![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Mars-Dragon-Scales-800x420.jpg\")
NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/MSSS\/Kevin M. Gill <\/p>\n NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/MSSS\/Kevin M. Gill <\/p>\n
The Curiosity Rover has captured photos of a strange crater on Mars where there is an abundance of rocks that look like dragon scales. <\/p>\n
NASA calls them \u201choneycomb-shaped polygons\u201d that crisscross the surface. They were pictured in the newly-named \u201cAntofagasta\u201d crater on Sol 4859, which is April 13 for the people on Earth. <\/p>\n
The Antofagasta crater is quite small, just 10 meters (32 feet) in diameter. But the Curiosity team is, well, curious about the area because they believe it is relatively young on a Martian geologic scale \u2014 50 million years old.<\/p>\n
\u201cCraters are very cool for many reasons, one of which is that they act as \u2018nature\u2019s drill,\u2019 exposing material to the surface through their walls and ejecta that would have otherwise been buried,\u201d NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cAntofagasta looks like it might be a relatively young crater, so there may be material in and around the crater that was only exposed to the harsh, organic-molecule destroying radiation environment on Mars\u2019 surface in the very recent past.\u201d <\/p>\n As Science Alert notes<\/a>, Mars lost its liquid surface water a long time ago. Nevertheless, scientists believe that the dragon scale patterns that Curiosity is looking at could be a sign that the region was once a very wet one. <\/p>\n Lakes on Earth that have been dried out leave behind a similar scaly pattern. And these often occur in areas that have been dried out and rehydrated in multiple cycles. That could be what happened in Antofagasta. <\/p>\n \u201cMany of the rocks we\u2019ve driven over have these incredible textures \u2014 thousands of honeycomb-shaped polygons crisscross their surface,\u201d the JPL writes. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen polygon-patterned rocks like these before, but they didn\u2019t seem quite this dramatically abundant, stretching across the ground for meters and meters in our Mastcam mosaics.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cThis week we continued to collect lots of images and chemical data that will help us distinguish between different hypotheses for how the honeycomb textures formed,\u201d JPL adds. <\/p>\n The Curiosity Rover continues to take interesting photos<\/a> as it trundles across the Martian surface. However, its wheels are in terrible shape.<\/a><\/p>\n Image credits: NASA\/JPL<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/MSSS\/Kevin M. Gill The Curiosity Rover has captured photos of a strange crater on Mars where there is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":391531,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[29587,127915,19718,127916,3323,111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":{"0":"post-391530","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-crater","9":"tag-curiosityrover","10":"tag-dragon","11":"tag-marscuriosityrover","12":"tag-nasa","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz","16":"tag-science","17":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391530","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=391530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/391531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Mars-Dragon-Scales2-800x713.jpg\")
This image was taken by Mastcam onboard NASA\u2019s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 4859. | NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/MSSS<\/p>\n![\"Black](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Mars-Dragon-Scales1-800x288.jpg\")
NASA\/JPL-Caltech\/Kevin M. Gill <\/p>\n