Dan Bartlett

The sky is a hazy shade of—er, summer—on Mars, as captured in a new image by NASA’s Perseverance rover.

NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars on February 18, 2020, and has since been spending every Martian sol exploring the western end of Jezero Crater, imaging the Martian surface, and—vitally—collecting rock samples that will be shipped to Earth in the early 2030s.
DARPA/Insider
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona

On December 12, from 156 miles above the surface of Mars, the HiRise camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted a peculiar sight: the face of a bear, peering up from the crust of the Red Planet.