A series of daily drives has taken NASA's Mars Rover Curiosity to a vantage point about halfway to a science destination area called Glenelg. The rover has been using its Mast Camera to examine the area ahead and also to catch special occasions when the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos pass in front of the sun from the rover's point of view.

Curiosity Traverse Map Through Sol 43
This map shows the route driven by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity through the 43rd Martian day, or sol, of the rover's mission on Mars (Sept. 19, 2012).

The route starts where the rover touched down, a site subsequently named Bradbury Landing. The line extending toward the right (eastward) from Bradbury Landing is the rover's path. Numbering of the dots along the line indicate the distance driven each sol. North is up. The scale bar is 200 meters (656 feet).

By Sol 43, Curiosity had driven at total of about 950 feet (290 meters). The Glenelg area farther east is the mission's first major science destination, selected as likely to offer a good target for Curiosity's first analysis of powder collected by drilling into a rock.

The image used for the map is from an observation of the landing site by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

On the Road to Glenelg
This mosaic from the Mast Camera on NASA's Curiosity rover shows the view looking toward the "Glenelg" area, where three different terrain types come together.

All three types are observed from orbit with the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. By driving there, Curiosity will be able to explore them.

One of the three terrain types is light-toned with well-developed layering, which likely records deposits of sedimentary materials. There are also black bands that run through the area and might constitute additional layers that alternate with the light-toned layers.

The black bands are not easily seen from orbit and are on the order of about 3.3-feet (1-meter) thick. Both of these layer types are important science targets.

This mosaic is composed of seven images. The Mastcam 34-millimeter camera took a series of four images; embedded within that series is a second set of three images taken with the Mastcam 100-millimeter camera.