Seven Years After It Landed On Mars, Here Are Some Of The Curiosity Rover's Best Photos

It's been a whole seven years since NASA's Curiosity Rover first touched down on Mars on August 6, 2012. Since then, it's been putting across the surface of the Red Planet, carrying out analysis and giving us some truly amazing shots of the surface.

Images courtesy: NASA/JPL

1. First day on Mars

NASA's Curiosity landed at the Gale Crater early August 2012. Shortly after, it commemorated the momentous occasion with a selfie, that would also show NASA any visible damage on the rover. That's Mount Sharp in the distance.

2. Curiosity's selfie

NASA had to actually assemble this selfie of Curiosity from a group of images taken with the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager in early 2013.

3. A Martian sunset

In 2015, the rover gave us this magical sight of a sunset on Mars. NASA used four images taken by across a span of just under 7 minutes in order to generate this sequence. It's the first sunset Curiosity observed in colour.

4. "There is no spoon"

This was a routine image of the surface snapped by Curiosity in May 2016. UFO enthusiasts though were stoked about what looked liked alien litter on the surface of the planet. Nope, turns out it was just mud in a coincidental shape.

5. Drifting sands

This gif was again made using an image sequence covering an entire day. Essentially, it shows how active the wind on Mars is.

6. That's a lot of sand

The Namib Dune reaches an impressive 13 feet upwards as you can see in this image taken by Curiosity in late 2015.

7. Curiosity's shameless plug

The cheeky rover managed to sneak its name into this 2015 shot of a sandstone slab named Windjana.

8. An even better selfie

NASA added another image to Curiosity's self-portrait collection in early 2015. This one shows off the surrounding landscape even better though.

9. Egg Rock

The Egg Rock got its name for obvious reasons. Found in 2016, the meteorite is barely 1.6 inches long, but Curiosity managed to get a closeup.

10. A faraway hello

See that tiny blue spot in the center of the image? That's Curiosity, as seen by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter from space in 2017.

11. Billion-Pixel Landscape

This image actually contains a whopping 1.3 billion pixels. It's a composite of 896 photos taken by Curiosity at the Rocknest site, over several days in October and November 2012.

12. Strata at Mount Sharp Base

In this shit at the Kimberly formation in 2014, you can get a good look at the rock strata near the base of Mount Sharp. According to NASA, their layout indicates that water once flowed toward a basin here.

13. Dune Ripples

Taken over two days in 2017, this scene shows ripples in the Bagnold Dunes, similar to on Earth.