Red dawn?

NASA has released stunning images of Mars at dawn, revealing the planet’s mysterious cliffs in unprecedented detail.

The interplanetary photo-op comes courtesy of the space agency’s Curiosity rover, which has been combing the surface of the Red Planet since it was dispatched there in 2012.

Snapped via the vehicle’s Mastcam on August 11 at 8:30 am Martian time, the photos show a dark blue foreground with distant cliffs illuminated by sunlight — like the interstellar version of an 1800s sublime landscape painting.

“This scene has a wildness that reminds me of a road trip through Monument Valley, Arizona,” said Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, Reuters reported. “You can almost feel the silence and the endless open space under the sky.”

This marks the most detailed depiction to date of the yardangs, planetary formations that extend for about 10 miles across the northwestern reaches of Mount Sharp.

Curiosity has been scaling this 3-mile-high Martian mountain since 2014, notably reaching 0.6 miles in elevation — the most ever ascended on Mars.

As it draws nearer, scientists hope the exploration bot can shed some light on the Yardang layer, which has long baffled researchers.

For one, these anomalous monoliths look quite different from all the terrain the rover has roamed before, according to Vasavada.

Despite forming one billion years ago — roughly the same time as the mountain on which it sits — this sedimentary patina “doesn’t appear to be part of the continuous stack of layers that make up the layer-cake of Mount Sharp,” the scientist observed.

“It was added on a little later,” Vasavada explained. “It’s above what geologists call an unconformity: a gap in time where previous layers eroded down before new layers were deposited on top.”

The scientist suspects that the crust was originally wind-blown sediment blown there by volcanic activity.

When this dust hardened into rock, “eons of wind carved ‌up the rock layer into ridges called yardangs,” said Vasavada.

Curiosity is projected to reach the yardangs sometime in 2027-28, whereupon it will use its instruments to sample and analyze the sediment, thereby painting a clearer picture of its provenance.

“That’s what makes it exciting to reach,” Vasavada said in a NASA release. “No one is sure exactly what created this layer.”

Prior studies of Mount Sharp revealed that each layer corresponded to a different geological period, providing insight into the lakes, streams and other water bodies that once covered the surface when Mars was lusher and warmer than the desolate rock it is today.

In 2025, Curiosity dug up some carbon-rich minerals that suggested that the planet’s hostile surface might have even harbored life.

By roving deep into the Yardangs, researchers hope they can get a better sense of the “dawn” of the Red Planet.