APRIL 22, 2015

A view from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on April 8, 2015, catches sight of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover passing through a valley called "Artist's Drive" on the lower slope of Mount Sharp.

The image from the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera shows the rover's position after a drive of about 75 feet (23 meters) during the 949th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's work on Mars.

The location of the rover, with its shadow extending toward the right, is indicated with an inscribed rectangle. North is toward the top. The view covers an area about 550 yards (500 meters) across. An unannotated version of the image is at:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/mro/20150422/pia19392-non.jpg

Curiosity used a route through Artist's Drive on its way toward higher layers on Mount Sharp after examining exposures of the mountain's basal geological unit at "Pahrump Hills." The rover's "Logan Pass" science destination is at the bottom left of this image. A wider map of the area is at

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA19390

This image is an excerpt from HiRISE observation ESP_040770_1755. Other image products from this observation are available at:

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_040770_1755

The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colorado. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project and Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona