Curiosity has sent back an incredible panoramic image of the towering mountain which looms above the crater it has spent the last eight months exploring on the surface of Mars.
Aeolis Mons rises nearly three-and-a-half miles (18,000 ft) from the center of the Gale Crater, making its base to peak height greater than any mountain on Earth.
Known unofficially as Mount Sharp, the massive peak is an enormous layered-mound of eroded sediment rising above the crater floor location Curiosity has been exploring.
he lower slopes of Mount Sharp remain the final destination for the mission, though the rover will first spend many more weeks around a location called 'Yellowknife Bay'.
That's where it recently found evidence of a past environment which could have been once favorable for microbial life.
A pair of mosaics, just released by NASA, assembled from dozens of telephoto images taken by Curiosity shows Mount Sharp in dramatic detail.
The component images were taken by the 100-millimeter-focal-length telephoto lens camera mounted on the right side of Curiosity's remote sensing mast on September 20 last year, the 45th Martian day of the rover's mission on the Red Planet.
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