NASA’s Curiosity Rover Finds a Vast Sea of Strange Honeycomb Patterns on Mars

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Ellyn Lapointe· Jul 30, 2026 · 3:25 PM UTC ·2 min read · 0 reactions · 0 comments · 2 views

NASA’s Curiosity Rover Finds a Vast Sea of Strange Honeycomb Patterns on Mars

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For more than a decade, NASA’s Curiosity rover has been trudging up Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain at the center of the Gale Crater on Mars. The image is made up of 340 individual snapshots that Curiosity beamed back to Earth, where scientists stitched them together. While this isn’t the first time the rover has spotted these “polygonal fractures,” as NASA calls them, it has never found so many in one place before.

Key facts

▪For more than a decade, NASA’s Curiosity rover has been trudging up Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain at the center of the Gale Crater on Mars.
▪The image is made up of 340 individual snapshots that Curiosity beamed back to Earth, where scientists stitched them together.
▪While this isn’t the first time the rover has spotted these “polygonal fractures,” as NASA calls them, it has never found so many in one place before.

How this story was covered

3 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 23 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.

Centre · 2

▪ Curiosity rover spots field of giant honeycomb on Mars – but no giant space bees — The Register
▪ NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Discovers Field of Honeycomb Textures — NASA

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Original publisher	Gizmodo
Canonical URL	https://gizmodo.com/nasas-curiosity-rover-finds-a-vast-sea-of-strange-honeycomb-patterns-on-mars-2000792909
Publication time	Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:25:24 +0000
Retrieval time	2026-07-30T15:27:02.121Z
Last seen	2026-07-30T15:27:02.121Z
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Cluster	9CVzRLEEIuAI · 3 stories
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Ranking reason	Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking.
Publisher visit	Yes — open original
Substitutes article?	No — link-out required for full text

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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand

For more than a decade, NASA’s Curiosity rover has been trudging up Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain at the center of the Gale Crater on Mars. Scientists believe lakes and streams covered the foothills of this peak billions of years ago, and Curiosity just found an abundance of evidence to support that hypothesis.cnx.cmd.push(function(){cnx({"playerId":"92b7b46b-43ed-4e0e-b21b-2c999302d9d7","settings":{"advertising":{"macros":{"AD_UNIT":"/23178111854/od.gizmodo.com/article","CHILD_UNIT":"article","POST_ID":"2000792909","POST_TYPE":"post","CHANNEL":"science","SECTION":"space","SUBSECTION":"","CATEGORIES":"space","TAGS":"curiosity-rover,mars,nasa","NOP":"0"},"timeBeforeFirstAd":0}}}).render("cnx-player-main")}); The rover captured a 360-degree panorama inside a valley…

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