NASA's Curiosity Rover Finds a Field of Honeycomb Polygons on Mars

NASA's Curiosity rover has photographed something it has never seen this much of: an expanse of Martian ground covered in small, tightly packed polygons, like the cells of a honeycomb pressed into rock.

The rover captured a 360-degree panorama on 19 and 20 June 2026 — sols 4,930 and 4,931 of a mission that was originally meant to last two years. Curiosity has come across polygonal ground several times before during its thirteen years on Mars. It has never found so many in one place.

Where it is

The field lies in a valley the team calls Valle Grande, which Curiosity is crossing as it climbs the foothills of Mount Sharp, the 5 km mountain at the centre of Gale Crater. The individual shapes are small — roughly 5 to 10 centimetres across, about the size of a fist. They cover the ground across the middle of the scene and wrap around a small sand-capped butte the team nicknamed Miraflores.

Why the shapes matter

Polygonal cracking is one of those patterns that nature arrives at repeatedly by different routes, which is exactly what makes it interesting and exactly what makes it hard to interpret. On Earth you see it in dried mud, in permafrost that has been through enough freeze-thaw cycles, and in cooled lava. On Mars, the candidate explanations include:

• sediment drying out and shrinking, the way mud cracks form;
• repeated temperature swings cracking the surface;
• compaction after the material was buried;
• shrinkage from mineral changes or loss of water from the rock.

Several of those routes involve water leaving. That is why the team is interested: get the mechanism right and the polygons become a record of how and when water departed this part of Mars. Get it wrong and they are just texture. Curiosity's job now is to work out which.

Fitting into the bigger story

Curiosity has been climbing Mount Sharp for years precisely because the mountain's layers stack up like pages — lower layers laid down when Gale Crater held water, higher ones from a drier Mars. Driving uphill is effectively reading forward through that transition. Features that plausibly mark water leaving the system are exactly what you would hope to find at this altitude in the sequence.

You can follow the rover's day-to-day progress in our Mars rover log, and see current conditions at Gale Crater on the Mars page.

Story Summary

NASA's Curiosity rover photographed a 360-degree view of a large field of polygonal, honeycomb-like textures in Valle Grande on the foothills of Mount Sharp, on 19 and 20 June 2026. The shapes are 5 to 10 cm across and represent the largest concentration of such features the mission has encountered. Polygons like these can form when sediment dries and shrinks, when temperatures cycle sharply, through compaction, or through mineral change — and several of those paths involve water leaving the surface, which is why the team hopes the field records part of the story of how Mars dried out.