“I can’t imagine what it would have been like to witness these events."
NASA's six-wheeled robot rumbled to Gediz Vallis Ridge on Mount Sharp, a mountain the rover has slowly climbed since 2014.
The ridge is evidence from some 3 billion years ago, when Mars was a wet world, replete with lakes and roaring rivers. Back then, colossal debris flows hurled mud and car-sized boulders down the mountain; eons of the whistling Martian wind then chiseled away at this material, leaving the ridge you can see below.
"I can’t imagine what it would have been like to witness these events," geologist William Dietrich, a member of the Curiosity mission team, said in a statement.
"Huge rocks were ripped out of the mountain high above, rushed downhill, and spread out into a fan below."
Getting to the ridge wasn't easy. It took years to find a route there. And the journey required "one of the most difficult climbs the mission has ever faced," NASA explained.
It was like running up a sand dune covered in boulders, a Curiosity engineer said.
Once there, Curiosity captured 136 images that the space agency stitched together to create the mosaic below.