Gale Crater

Where Mount Sharp stands, there was once a basin that was sometimes filled by long-lived lakes, and the mud that settled in them built the layered rock at the mountain’s base. Higher up, the layers show an overall change from a wet landscape to a drier one.

Mount Sharp, formally Aeolis Mons, rises about 5 km above the crater floor.

Curiosity’s first drill sample, from Yellowknife Bay in 2013, showed that this part of Gale was once a wet place where microbes could have lived. In 2024 it cracked open a rock in the Gediz Vallis channel and found crystals of pure sulfur.

The rover is about 3 m long and 2.2 m tall to the top of its mast, about the size of a small SUV. In the game it is drawn simplified, from boxes and cylinders at those dimensions.

The wide view, about 200 × 200 km at roughly 98 m per pixel, is the HRSC elevation model from ESA’s Mars Express, coloured from orbital images. Around Curiosity, a 20 × 20 km square is sharper, at about 5 m per pixel, from the USGS merged elevation model and orthophotos built from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter images.

The sharper square fades in once you are high above it or outside it, so the ground never jumps under you. Shadows are baked for one late-afternoon Sun, about 18° up. Below the data’s resolution, small craters and surface texture are generated.

Real: the shape of the terrain, Curiosity’s position and heading (as of sol 5021, 21 September 2026), and the waypoints. The Peace Vallis fan and the Mount Sharp summit are positions worked out from published maps and the elevation data; their cards say how.

Not real: the lander is fictional, and the radio is a game. The sky’s colour, the haze and the shadow brightness were tuned by eye against Curiosity’s own photographs.