On a windswept plain 140 million miles from Earth, a dark speck moves across the ochre sands of Mars. For more than a decade, NASA’s Curiosity rover has explored the alien world, climbing rocky hills, sniffing for ancient water, and searching for secrets that only a lonely machine on a barren, frightening planet could find.

Now, for the first time, it has been caught in the act from above.

In an image released by NASA, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured Curiosity mid-drive all the way from orbit, crawling across the floor of Gale Crater. It’s a striking, almost candid moment. We see a tiny blotch trailing a faint, meandering gray line — its tire tracks etched into the Martian dust.

The image was taken on February 28, 2025, by the orbiter’s HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera. The contrast is enhanced to make the rover easier to spot. “It’s believed to be the first orbital image of the rover mid-drive across the Red Planet,” NASA officials said in a statement. Previous images had always shown Curiosity standing still.

A Journey Across Martian History

The tracks in the new photo stretch about 320 meters, or roughly 1,050 feet. They mark the rover’s slow, careful progress over 11 separate drives, beginning on February 2.

Curiosity’s top speed is a humble 0.1 miles per hour — far slower than a human walking pace. But slow and steady wins the race when navigating an alien landscape. Curiosity runs on a small 110-watt nuclear generator and must carefully conserve energy. It also has to pick its way across unpredictable, hazardous ground, avoiding slopes and loose rocks that could trap or damage it.

Since landing in August 2012, the car-sized rover has traveled just 34.59 kilometers (about 21.5 miles). Its goal has never been speed, but reliable exploration.

In recent months, Curiosity has been making its way from the Gediz Vallis channel — a landscape thought to have been carved by massive floods — toward a new target: a cluster of mysterious rock formations that scientists believe may be boxwork. On Earth, boxwork forms when groundwater flows through fractures in rock, leaving behind webs of mineral deposits that later resist erosion.

If Curiosity confirms that these Martian structures formed in the same way, it could be a tantalizing clue. Conditions underground would have been warmer and wetter, offering a potential refuge for ancient microbial life. “If trace evidence of ancient life can be found on Mars, the boxwork formation is one of the more promising places to look,” researchers noted.

Curiosity’s work at Gale Crater has already been a game-changer for our understanding of Mars. It revealed that the crater once hosted a long-lived lake-and-stream system, rich in the ingredients necessary for life. It even found a potential chemical energy source that could have fueled microbial metabolisms — a discovery that thrilled astrobiologists.

The rover’s most recent findings include patches of pure sulfur and layered rock formations resembling a giant, eroded cake. NASA scientists are still working to explain this peculiar formation.

Slow and Steady

Despite Curiosity’s slow pace, the tracks it leaves behind are visible for months. Mars is a tempestuous planet, and strong winds eventually erase these marks. But for now, they stand as a ghostly signature of human ingenuity on an otherwise untouched world.

Captured from more than 150 miles overhead, the image shows Curiosity perched at the base of a steep slope, which it has since climbed. Matching timestamps from the orbiter and the rover’s command logs confirmed that Curiosity was actively driving when the photo was taken, completing a 69-foot (21-meter) drive that day.

HiRISE usually photographs with a strip of color in the middle, but this time Curiosity was caught in the camera’s black-and-white zone. The lack of color doesn’t dull the emotional punch. From so far away, the rover is just a smudge — but to those who have followed its mission, it feels monumental.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the planet since 2006, continues to do great science. Besides snapping pictures like this one, MRO hunts for signs of past water activity and acts as a vital communication link between Earth and surface missions like Curiosity and its younger cousin, Perseverance.