After 14 Years on Mars, Curiosity Finds Puzzling New Pits in the Bedrock

NASA's Curiosity rover has spent 14 years on the surface of Mars, and the planet is still turning up surprises. During the week of the mission's Aug. 21, 2026 planning session, the rover's team found broad, shallow pits dotted across the bedrock — solid rock that lies beneath the loose soil and dust on the surface — in both of its current workspaces. The mission team said the feature was unlike anything they had seen before.

Pits are common on Mars: they usually form when a resistant nodule or pebble embedded in rock weathers away, leaving behind a hollow. But the pits found this week were much broader and shallower than earlier examples, and none of them had an obvious leftover object that could explain how they formed.

Curiosity's MAHLI and Mastcam instruments studied the pits closely, capturing stereo image mosaics and tightly overlapping pictures that can be combined into a digital elevation model, a detailed map of the ground's shape. The mission team called the pits a welcome new puzzle into the processes that have affected this section of rock within the layered geology, or stratigraphy, of Mount Sharp.

Elsewhere in the workspace, the rover examined more typical bedrock made up of complex rock layers whose texture and structure changed over short vertical distances, which may reflect changes in the conditions under which the rock formed. Instruments including ChemCam, MAHLI and APXS also analyzed gray, rough, resistant rock layers that differed from the surrounding bedrock, likely pointing to a different chemical makeup, while ChemCam separately studied a loose gray rock fragment to help understand where such rocks come from.

Curiosity's environmental science team also increased the frequency of weather and atmosphere observations that week to monitor a possible regional dust storm. By the end of the week, the storm appeared to be dissipating, and the team had lost one of its planning days due to a lost communications downlink.