NASA’s Curiosity rover explores Mount Sharp, a 5-mile-tall (8-kilometer-tall) mountain within the basin of Gale Crater on Mars.

Curiosity’s Deputy Project Scientist, Abigail Fraeman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, gives viewers a descriptive tour of Curiosity’s location. The panorama was captured by the rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, on July 3 2021, the 3,167th Martian day, or sol, of its mission.

Curiosity landed nine years ago on August 5 2012, with a mission to study whether different Martian environments could have supported microbial life in the ancient past, when long-lived lakes and groundwater existed within Gale Crater.

For more about Curiosity, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/home/ and https://nasa.gov/msl/

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS