Published : 31 Jul 2026, 01:10 AM
Updated : 08 Sep 2026, 09:29 AM
Mars just got a lot more interesting -- and a lot more geometric.
NASA's Curiosity rover has stumbled upon the largest field of honeycomb-shaped ground cracks it has ever seen, after starting its climb up a Martian valley nicknamed "Valle Grande", and scientists are itching to figure out what's behind it.
The tiny, jigsaw-like patterns -- known as polygonal fractures -- measure just 4 to 8cm across, reports NASA.
Curiosity has spotted patches of them before, but nothing on this scale.
A 360-degree panorama snapped over two Martian days in June shows the shapes stretching out in every direction, even wrapping around the sides of a nearby six-metre mound charmingly named "Miraflores".
"This sea of polygons took our breath away," said Ashwin Vasavada, the mission's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
His team is now digging into the shapes and chemistry of the terrain, hoping the rocks themselves might explain how the pattern formed.
So what's the mystery?
Some polygons Curiosity has found before turned out to be plain old mud cracks.
But similar textures can also form from repeated freeze-thaw cycles, or from pressure squeezing water out of buried sediment over time -- meaning this new patch could have a very different origin story.
It's just the latest curveball from a rover that's been full of them since touching down on Mars back in August 2012.
Curiosity has already turned up sulfur crystals, shiny metallic meteorites, and oddball rock shapes -- not to mention the biggest prize of all: solid evidence that ancient Mars once had the water and chemistry needed to support microbial life.
For nearly ten years now, Curiosity has been trundling up Mount Sharp, a 5km mountain that scientists believe once overlooked lakes and streams billions of years ago.
Buried in its rocks, the rover has found carbon-based molecules that could be building blocks for RNA and DNA -- though whether biology or plain geology made them remains an open question.
Curiosity is managed by Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, as part of the agency's Mars Exploration Program.
