NASA Mars Curiosity rover turns 6: Close-up photos of Mars’ surface

A location on Mars associated with the best-selling novel and Hollywood movie, “The Martian” This area is in the Acidalia Planitia region and in the novel and the movie, it is the landing site of a crewed mission named Ares 3.REUTERS/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

The surface of Mars is weird and beautiful.

For six years now, since its landing on August 5, 2012, the Mars Curiosity rover has been exploring one area of our next-planet neighbor.

Curiosity has spent all of its time in the Gale Crater, where it’s traveled just over 12 miles, yet the rover has captured plenty of stunning images. NASA has also collected photos of the Martian surface using spacecraft and other rovers like Opportunity, which is more than 15 years old.

At times, photos of the surface of Mars depict the prototypical idea of the red planet: rocky, dry, dusty, and not unlike a desert you might see on Earth. Yet other formations of craters and canyons are completely different from anything on our planet — there are patches of dark and light colors, carbon dioxide dry ice, and otherworldly patterns.

There’s weather too, like the huge dust storm that recently covered the entire planet.

Here are some of the images that show how stunning the surface of Mars really is, though there’s still far more to be discovered, of course. Just recently, scientists announced that they think there might be a 12-mile-long lake of liquid water hidden underneath one of the red planet’s ice caps.