Mars is a graveyard of giants, but none are quite as loud—scientifically speaking—as Aeolis Mons. You probably know it as Mount Sharp. It sits right in the middle of Gale Crater like a massive, five-kilometer-tall stack of pancakes left out in the sun for three billion years. When we look at the latest pictures of the sides of Mount Sharp Mars, we aren't just seeing pretty rocks or desktop wallpapers. We’re looking at a history book where the pages are made of silt, sulfur, and clay.
The Curiosity rover has been crawling up this thing since 2012. It’s slow work. Imagine a car that drives at a turtle's pace and stops to sniff every single pebble it passes. But that patience pays off. The images sent back by the Mastcam and the ChemCam instruments have fundamentally changed how we view the "Red Planet." It’s not just red. Honestly, it’s purple, grey, teal, and ochre.
The Layer Cake of Gale Crater
The most striking thing about these photos is the layering. It’s perfect. If you’ve ever been to the Grand Canyon, you get the vibe, but Mount Sharp is weirder. The base of the mountain is made of clay-rich minerals. In the world of geology, clay is a massive "Check This Out" sign. Clay usually forms in the presence of neutral water. Not the acidic, battery-acid stuff we see elsewhere on Mars, but water you could potentially drink.
As Curiosity climbs higher, the pictures show a shift. The clay disappears. In its place, we see sulfates. This transition is a visual recording of the exact moment Mars began to dry out. It’s a literal snapshot of a planet dying. One minute you have lush (well, wet) lakebeds, and the next, you have salty mineral deposits left behind by evaporating ponds.
The sheer scale of the "Murray Formation" at the base is staggering. It’s hundreds of feet of mudstone. That much mudstone doesn't just happen. It requires a lake that persisted for millions of years. This wasn't a flash flood. It was a stable environment. When you zoom in on the high-resolution shots of the sides of the mountain, you can see "cross-bedding." These are slanted lines in the rock that show which way the water was flowing. It’s like a fossilized compass.
The Weirdness of the Gediz Vallis Ridge
Recently, the pictures of the sides of Mount Sharp Mars have focused on a feature called the Gediz Vallis Ridge. This place is a mess, and geologists love it. It’s a pile of boulders and debris that looks like it was dumped there by a giant celestial truck.
✨ Don't miss: When were iPhones invented and why the answer is actually complicated
Actually, it was likely formed by massive debris flows—think of them as mudslides on steroids. These occurred much later than the formation of the mountain's base. This tells us that even after Mars started drying out, water was still showing up in violent, episodic bursts. It wasn't a clean "wet to dry" transition. It was messy. It was stuttering. The mountain shows us that Mars fought to stay "alive" for a long time.
Why the Colors Look Different in Every Photo
You’ve probably noticed that some photos of Mount Sharp look like a dusty desert, while others look vibrant and blue. No, NASA isn't lying to you. It’s about "White Balancing."
If you took a photo on Mars with your iPhone, everything would look muddy and orange because the Martian atmosphere filters light differently than Earth's. Scientists often "white balance" the images to look like they would under Earth’s lighting. This helps geologists identify minerals. A blue-ish rock in a white-balanced photo is a lot easier to identify as basalt than a rock that just looks "kind of dark orange-grey" under a dusty Martian sky.
Then there’s the dust. It gets everywhere. It coats the sides of the mountain, masking the true colors of the strata. Every once in a while, a dust devil swirls past and cleans a patch of rock, or Curiosity uses its brush tool. Suddenly, the pictures reveal a world that looks remarkably like the high deserts of Chile or the Southwest United States.
The Problem with Canyons and Shadows
Taking pictures of the sides of Mount Sharp Mars isn't as easy as pointing and clicking. The lighting is a nightmare. Because the mountain is so rugged, the shadows are deep and "hard." There’s no thick atmosphere to scatter light into the dark spots.
🔗 Read more: Why Everyone Is Talking About the Gun Switch 3D Print and Why It Matters Now
Curiosity’s team has to time the shots perfectly to capture the "Marker Band." This is a thin, dark layer of rock that stands out against the lighter slopes. It’s incredibly tough and has resisted erosion better than the layers around it. It shouldn't be there, according to some older models of how the mountain formed. Seeing it in crisp detail allows researchers like Ashwin Vasavada, the project scientist, to argue that the lake cycles in Gale Crater were far more complex than we ever dreamed.
What the Sand Dunes are Hiding
At the foot of the mountain lies the Bagnold Dunes. These aren't your average beach dunes. They are active. They move. In the photos, they look like dark, rippling waves of obsidian.
The sand here is made of olivine and pyroxene—volcanic minerals. They’re dark and heavy. Watching these dunes move over months of photography has taught us about the Martian wind. Even though the air is only 1% as thick as Earth's, it’s still strong enough to carve a mountain. The wind is the primary sculptor of Mount Sharp today. It’s slowly eating the mountain from the top down and the sides in.
- Lamination: Thin layers in the rock, visible in close-ups, suggesting seasonal changes in water flow.
- Vugs: Small holes in the rock where crystals used to be. The pictures show these are often filled with minerals left behind by groundwater.
- Nodules: Little round "blueberries" or bumps. These form when minerals precipitate out of water within the sediment.
The variety of textures on the mountain's flanks is a nightmare for the rover's wheels, but a dream for the scientists back at JPL. We’ve seen "gator-back" terrain—rocks so sharp and wind-scoured they look like scales. These photos forced NASA to change how they drive the rover to prevent the wheels from being shredded.
Real Evidence of a Changing Climate
We used to think Mars lost its water and that was it. Game over.
💡 You might also like: How to Log Off Gmail: The Simple Fixes for Your Privacy Panic
But the pictures of the sides of Mount Sharp Mars show us something else. We see layers of wind-blown dust sandwiched between layers of water-laid silt. This is proof of "climate cycling." Mars went through dry spells and wet spells, probably triggered by changes in the planet’s tilt.
It’s a bit like the Ice Ages on Earth, but instead of "Cold and Warm," it was "Dry and Damp." This is huge for the search for life. If Mars was damp for millions of years, dried out, and then became damp again, life would have had to be incredibly resilient. Or, it would have had to "re-start."
The Limits of Our Vision
We have to be honest: as good as these cameras are, we’re still looking through a keyhole. Curiosity’s Mastcam has a resolution of about 150 microns per pixel at its closest range. That’s about the width of a human hair.
That sounds great, right? But it’s not enough to see a fossilized microbe. We can see the environment where life could have lived, but we can't see the life itself. We are looking at the "house" and trying to guess if anyone ever lived in it. The pictures of the sides of Mount Sharp Mars show a very comfortable-looking house. It had water, it had the right chemicals (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur), and it had energy sources.
Actionable Insights for Mars Enthusiasts
If you want to dive deeper into these images, don't just look at the "Official Releases" on news sites. They are often cropped and color-corrected for aesthetics.
- Access the Raw Data: Go to the NASA Mars Exploration Program website. You can see every single image Curiosity sends back, often within hours of it hitting Earth. You’ll see the "failures"—the blurry shots, the overexposed ones, and the weird calibration frames. It gives you a much better sense of how hard it is to photograph another planet.
- Use HiRISE for Context: While Curiosity is on the ground, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is overhead with the HiRISE camera. It’s so powerful it can see the rover's tracks from space. Comparing the "side view" from the rover with the "top-down" view from HiRISE helps you understand the topography of the mountain.
- Look for the Scale: Martian photos are notoriously difficult to judge for size. There are no trees or houses for reference. Look for "rover tracks" in the foreground or the "calibration target" on the rover itself to understand how big a cliff or a boulder actually is.
- Monitor the Weather: Check the dust opacity (called "Tau"). If the Tau is high, the pictures of the sides of Mount Sharp Mars will look hazy. This usually happens during the Martian southern summer when dust storms are more common.
The story of Mount Sharp is still being written. Every meter the rover climbs is a step forward in time. We are currently exploring the "sulfate-bearing unit," which represents the final major transition of the Martian climate. What lies above that? We can see it from a distance—more sheer cliffs and potentially even more evidence of ancient water channels. The mountain is tall, the rover is old, but the view only gets better as we go up.