The latest discovery by NASA’s intrepid Curiosity rover has revealed a series of odd polygonal shaped fractures, resembling mysterious honeycomb or waffle-like patterns on the Red Planet’s surface.
One of two rovers NASA is currently operating on the surface of Mars, Curiosity has continued to scour the Martian landscape since 2011 in search of signs that Mars might have ever been able to support life at any time in its history.
Along with a diverse collection of chemical and mineral evidence supporting the Red Planet’s potential habitability in the ancient past, recent discoveries like these distinctive polygonal patterns in Martian rock are revealing additional clues about what the planet’s environment was like long ago.
In a recent update on the Curiosity blog, Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, a planetary geologist at the University of New Brunswick, said the unusual patterns were spotted as the rover arrived at its current workspace. Imagery obtained by the rover revealed terrain that was “full of rough, gnarly material, which can be tricky targets for contact science instruments,” especially Curiosity’s Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS), which is used to analyze chemical elements in Martian rock and soil samples the rover encounters.
Curiosity’s Front Hazard Avoidance Camera (Front Hazcam) obtained the images on May 1, 2025, revealing what O’Connell-Cooper called “amazingly well preserved polygonal shaped fractures,” featuring raised ridges of about one centimeter each that resemble a “patchwork of honeycombs, or maybe a patch of waffles.”
Although this isn’t the first time such distinctive patterns have been observed by the Curiosity team, the most recent examples are among the most extensive and well-preserved yet encountered, covering an estimated surface area of as much as 30 meters.
The polygonal patterns appear to extend close to the edge of a series of boxwork fracture structures by a feature the Curiosity team calls Ghost Mountain butte, a target of future exploration in the rover’s exploration of the region.
Operating the APXS last week, O’Connell-Cooper said that the team chose to focus on a pair of targets, designated “Orosco Ridge” and “Box Canyon,” which lies in one of the nearby flat polygons, where the rover’s ChemCam will be used to analyze the composition of the ridges.
“We could stay here for a week and still find things to look at in this workspace,” O’Connell-Cooper wrote at the Curiosity blog. However, the team ultimately decided to use one of Curiosity’s seventeen cameras, the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), to observe a feature known as the “Valley of the Moon,” a dog’s eye mosaic that was spotted on a large block nearby.
The team hopes observations of this feature may help to reveal new clues about how fractures on stony Martian features interact with one another, and also reveal deeper insights about their interactions with layers within the planet’s bedrock.
The recent honeycomb, waffle, and other “wild fracture structures” observed by Curiosity are only a few of the intriguing things the rover has spotted, which aren’t limited to just imagery of unique features on the Martian environment. In addition to physical features encountered in Curiosity’s workspaces as it treks along the Red Planet, the rover has been collecting environmental and atmospheric data that monitors everything from levels of argon present in the Martian atmosphere, to the presence of water and chlorine in its subsurface.
Additional data on Martian weather, as well as ultraviolet radiation that strikes the planet’s surface, have all been collected, along with occasional appearances by Martian dust devils. Last month, a group of these swirling dust devils were filmed by NASA’s Perseverance rover from its position in Jezero crater.
Additional details about Curiosity’s ongoing studies of the Martian landscape can be found on NASA’s official Curiosity page.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. He can be reached by email at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on X: @MicahHanks.