NASA rover takes striking image of dawn’s early light on Mars

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON, Oct 7 (Reuters) NASA has released a striking image of dawn on the Martian surface taken by its Curiosity rover, showing sunlight bathing jagged crags formed billions of years ago as the car-sized vehicle continues to explore Earth s planetary neighbor. Curiosity landed in ​2012 in Gale Crater near the Martian equator, and since 2014 has been climbing ‌Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-km-tall) mountain rising from the crater floor. The image was taken by the six-wheeled rover s Mastcam camera about an hour after the sun rose above a landscape featuring wind-carved cliffs in the distance. The bright craggy peaks in the distance are a rock layer that is quite different in appearance from all the layers the rover has driven through ‌so far. ​We think it once was wind-blown sediment, maybe sand or maybe ⁠even ash that blew into the ⁠crater from nearby volcanic activity. After the sediment hardened into rock, eons of wind carved up the rock layer into ridges called