New images taken from one of NASA's rovers on Mars are giving us a stunning look at the red planet's landscape like we've never seen before.
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A video released by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory shows a panoramic view of Mars' Gale Crater, captured by the Curiosity Rover which has been on the planet for nine years.
NASA said the rover had to climb the five-mile-tall Mount Sharp to get the breathtaking view inside the 96-mile-wide crater -- which used to be a lake.
The Curiosity Rover is now somewhere between a region enriched with clay minerals and one dominated by salty minerals, called sulfates.
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"The rocks here will begin to tell us how this once-wet planet changed into the dry Mars of today, and how long habitable environments persisted even after that happened," Abigail Fraeman, Curiosity's deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement.
The panoramic images are so clear, NASA said, because it is winter where Curiosity is at right now and the skies are nearly dust-free. You can see close to 20 miles, providing a vast view of the crater landscape.
Curiosity launched from earth on November 26, 2011 and landed on Mars on August 5, 2012. It has been exploring Mount Sharp since 2014. Its mission is to study whether the Martian environment could have supported microbial life when lakes and groundwater existed in the planet's ancient past. The rover obtains rock samples and determines which minerals are present. So far, it has traveled 16.27 miles and drilled 32 rock samples.
Curiosity is already making its way toward its next destination in the crater. To get there, the rover has to climb a craggy hill that stretches 450 feet tall and a towering butte that's taller than a four-story building. NASA said it will take about a year before the rover reaches its goat at the Greenheugh Pediment, a slope with a sandstone cap that it briefly summited last year.
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