<\/p>\n From orbit, the intersecting ridges resemble a massive spiderweb sprawled across the Martian surface<\/a>. Scientists believe the ridges formed when ancient groundwater circulated through fractures in the rock, depositing minerals that hardened certain zones. Over billions of years, wind erosion wore away the weaker surrounding material, leaving behind the lattice of tougher ridges.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n Understanding these formations could help researchers refine timelines for when liquid water<\/a> may have existed near the Martian surface \u2014 a key factor in assessing Mars’ past habitability. The web-like formations suggest groundwater was present later in Mars’ history than previously thought, raising new questions about how long the planet may have supported conditions favorable to microbial life, according to the statement.<\/p>\n Until Curiosity reached the region, scientists couldn’t confirm what these spiderweb-like formations<\/a> actually looked like up close or fully understand how they formed \u2014 something only a rover on the ground could resolve. But getting that view wasn’t easy: drivers had to carefully steer the nearly one-ton rover along narrow ridgelines barely wider than the vehicle itself to gather the necessary images.<\/p>\n “It almost feels like a highway we can drive on. But then we have to go down into the hollows, where you need to be mindful of Curiosity’s wheels slipping or having trouble turning in the sand,” Ashley Stroupe, operations systems engineer at JPL, said in the statement. “There’s always a solution. It just takes trying different paths.”<\/p>\n \n NASA’s Curiosity rover captured this panorama using its Mastcam instrument on Sept. 26, 2025, revealing new details of web-like boxwork ridges on Mount Sharp, including narrow mineralized ridges and sandy hollows between them. (Image credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/MSSS)<\/p>\n Closer inspection revealed bumpy, pea\u2011sized mineral nodules embedded in the ridges and hollow floors \u2014 another signature of past groundwater activity. Unexpectedly, these nodules were not concentrated near central fractures<\/a> as predicted, but scattered along ridge walls and depressions, offering new insight on how water and minerals interacted across the Martian terrain.<\/p>\n \n These bumpy nodules were formed by minerals left behind as groundwater was drying out on Mars billions of years ago. NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover captured images of these pea-size features while exploring geologic formations called boxwork on Aug. 21, 2025. (Image credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/MSSS)<\/p>\n Each layer of the 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) Mount Sharp records a distinct chapter of Mars’ changing ancient climate<\/a>. As Curiosity climbs, the terrain shows a clear shift toward increasingly dry conditions, broken up by occasional wetter intervals when rivers and lakes briefly resurfaced.<\/p>\n “Seeing boxwork this far up the mountain suggests the groundwater table had to be pretty high,” Tina Seeger, a mission scientist from Rice University, said in the statement. “And that means the water needed for sustaining life could have lasted much longer than we thought, looking from orbit.”<\/p>\n \n A grayscale photo showing a shadow of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover on the ground, with its square Mastcam “head” overlaid on a rocky terrain of “boxwork” patterns across the Martian landscape. (Image credit: NASA\/JPL-Caltech)<\/p>\n Curiosity has also been using its drill to collect rock samples<\/a> from the boxwork region. Analyses of these samples have identified clay minerals atop ridge tops and carbonate deposits in the hollows \u2014 chemical clues that shed light on the environmental conditions when these rocks formed.<\/p>\n Using a technique called wet chemistry \u2014 a process that uses chemical reagents to help detect organic molecules \u2014 scientists looked for signatures of carbon-based compounds linked to life in pulverized rocks collected during Curiosity’s recent fourth sampling mission. The rover is expected to leave the boxwork formations behind in March as it continues its ascent of Mount Sharp<\/a>. Exploring this region helps scientists better understand how the Red Planet evolved from a wet world to the cold, dry desert seen today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured close\u2011up views of sprawling, web-like rock formations on Mars that look like giant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":305878,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-305877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305877\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/oxP2iwDpT9s87iHFhXNgD3.jpg\")
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