Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Images taken by Navigation Right B camera onboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 5061, November 1, 2026.
Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Alex Innanen, an atmospheric scientist at York University, notes that the NASA Curiosity Mars rover at Gale Crater has been keeping an eye on martian clouds.

These high-altitude clouds are characteristic of the sky above the robot’s exploration zone.

“Autumn means the return of high-altitude twilight clouds, which the low sun angle at sunset illuminates beautifully,” Innanen adds.

The twilight cloud activity picks up as the autumn progresses, and Curiosity-taken cloud movies recently caught the first high-altitude clouds of the season.

“Most of the clouds we tend to see at Gale Crater are suboptical, or too thin to be seen with either human eyes or with Curiosity’s robotic ‘eyes,’ but these twilight clouds are bright enough that we can see them in the raw Navcam images,” reports Innanen. “I’m looking forward to another Martian autumn of watching all these different clouds go by.”