A rover the size of a car photographed a stretch of Martian ground covered in small six-sided shapes. Scientists have several ideas about how they formed, and no way yet to pick between them.
On June 19 and 20, 2026 — Curiosity's 4,930th and 4,931st Martian days — the rover photographed a field of honeycomb-like polygons, each about 1.5 to 3 inches (4 to 8 centimetres) across.
Basis: NASA, “NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Discovers Field of Honeycomb Textures” (July 29, 2026)
The site is called Valle Grande, near a butte named Miraflores that stands about 20 feet (6 metres) tall.
Basis: Same NASA release
How did they form? NASA lists more than one possibility: mud that dried and cracked, ground that expanded and shrank through temperature cycles, or sediment squeezed until water was pressed out. The team has not decided which. That is not a gap in the reporting — it is the honest state of the science.
Cracked mud matters because cracking needs water, and drying needs water to leave. Patterns like this are part of how scientists read what ancient Mars was like.
Basis: Same NASA release (the textures are evidence used to study the ancient Martian environment)
※ A hypothesis is an idea that isn't proven yet.
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