Scaling a mountain, NASA rover sends home glorious Martian view

Tens of millions of miles beyond Earth, a nuclear-powered, car-sized rover is climbing a Martian mountain. NASA's Curiosity rover, while investigating Mars' past, has snapped over 683,790 pictures as it's rumbled over 21 miles of unforgiving desert terrain since 2012, and a recent view shows the space agency's robot overlooking a vast Martian wilderness. Some 3.7 billion years ago, a large object smashed into Mars, leaving the sizeable, 96-mile-wide Gale Crater we see today. When the region's surface rebounded after the powerful collision, it left a central peak, Mount Sharp, which preserves layers of the intriguing, and watery, Mars past. From its perch in the foothills of the 3.4-mile-high mountain, you can see over an expanse of plains, called Aeolis Palus, and beyond that the hilly walls of Gale Crater.