NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has done what it does best: point its camera at the Martian landscape and make Earthlings feel inadequate about their vacation photos. The rover captured a 360-degree view of a region filled with low ridges called boxwork formations between Nov. 9 and Dec. 7, 2025 (the 4,714th to 4,741st Martian days, or sols, of the mission). At 1.5 billion pixels, this is one of the largest panoramas Curiosity has ever taken - though the rover’s all-time record remains a 1.8-billion-pixel masterpiece, because of course it does. This newer panorama is made up of 1,031 individual images captured by Curiosity’s Mastcam using its right camera, which has a 100-millimeter focal length lens. The images were later sent to Earth and stitched together into the full panorama, likely by a team of very patient software engineers.

The images were taken at a ridgetop site nicknamed “Nevado Sajama,” where Curiosity collected a rock sample using a drill on the end of its robotic arm. Since May 2025, Curiosity has been exploring a region full of geologic formations called boxwork, which crisscross the surface for miles and look like giant spiderwebs when viewed from space - because Mars apparently also has arachnid-themed architecture. The new panorama shows them as they really are: low ridges standing roughly 3 to 6 feet (1 to 2 meters) tall and about 30 feet (9 meters) across with sandy hollows in between. It’s like a Martian version of a badminton court, but with way more rocks and no net.

Figure A is a high-resolution version of this panorama (1.8 gigabytes), which is probably best enjoyed on a computer with a lot of RAM and a patient internet connection. Figure B is a lower-resolution version of the panorama (276 megabytes) captured by Mastcam’s left camera, which has a 34-millimeter focal length lens. This version includes the rover’s deck, which is often left out of such imagery in order to reduce the amount of data relayed back to Earth - because even on Mars, they have to worry about data caps.

Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego built and operates Mastcam. So if you’re looking to complain about the file size, you know who to call.