NASA’s Curiosity rover has photographed a striking field of polygonal, honeycomb-shaped fractures etched into the Martian surface in Valle Grande, a valley the rover recently began climbing as part of its ascent of Mount Sharp. The individual polygons measure roughly 1.5 to 3 inches (4 to 8 centimeters) across and wrap around the base of a nearby butte nicknamed “Miraflores.”
Curiosity captured the scene on sols 4,930 and 4,931 of its mission (June 19-20, 2026), stitching the images into a 360-degree panorama credited to NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS. “We’ve seen a lot of fascinating landscapes through Curiosity’s eyes, but this sea of polygons took our breath away,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
What Causes the Pattern? Still an Open Question
Polygonal fracture networks like this one can form several different ways on Earth, and mission scientists have not settled on which mechanism, if any single one, produced this particular field. Candidate explanations under consideration include:
- Mud cracks from the repeated wetting and drying of fine sediment
- Thermal cycling, in which repeated swings between warm and cold temperatures fracture surface material over time
- Compression, in which built-up overlying rock squeezed water out of buried sediment, contracting it into a polygonal fracture pattern
No single cause has been confirmed, and NASA has been explicit that the formation mechanism remains under investigation. That ambiguity is itself scientifically useful: distinguishing between a water-driven origin (mud cracks, compression-driven dewatering) and a purely thermal one matters for reconstructing whether this part of Mars once held standing or pore water, and for how long.
Who Funds and Manages This, and Where the Data Goes
Curiosity is built and operated by JPL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, which funds the mission. JPL itself is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Imagery such as the Valle Grande panorama comes from Curiosity’s Mastcam, built by Malibu Space Science Systems (MSSS), which is why the image credit reads NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.
Beyond the press release, the raw and calibrated data behind discoveries like this one are deposited in NASA’s Planetary Data System (PDS), the agency’s long-term public archive for planetary science mission data. Once processed and validated, Curiosity’s imaging and instrument data become part of the PDS holdings, where they are openly accessible to researchers, students, and the public rather than remaining locked inside the mission team. That open-archive pipeline, from a NASA-funded, Caltech-managed mission through to a publicly queryable data repository, is a standard and deliberate part of how NASA planetary missions are run.
For now, the honeycomb field at Valle Grande stands as one more data point for the mission team to fold into its ongoing reconstruction of this part of Mars’s environmental history as Curiosity continues its climb.
Source: NASA/JPL, “NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Discovers a Field of Honeycomb Textures” (July 29, 2026).
