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May 2025

NASA Science Calendar Image of the Month. Image credit: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)–Caltech/University of Arizona

High-resolution image of a Martian crater wall captured by NASA’s HiRISE camera, showing layered terrain, boulder-strewn slopes, and streaks possibly formed by past landslides or erosion.

May 2025 Image

Learn about May's amazing image. Explore related topics, activities, games, and download desktop wallpaper.

Desktop and Mobile Wallpapers
Do Mars Science!
Discover More Topics
2025 Science Calendar
Other Images of the Month
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Martian Crater

  • The May calendar image of a Martian crater with icy blue frost near the rim was taken by the MRO (Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter), which has beamed back images of the surface of Mars since 2006. MRO's scientific discoveries have both confirmed and upended what we previsouly could only speculate about the red planet.

    Learn more about the Mars Reconnaisance Observer

    A computer monitoring displaying a high-resolution image of a Martian crater wall captured by NASA’s HiRISE camera, showing layered terrain, boulder-strewn slopes, and streaks possibly formed by past landslides or erosion.

Do Mars Science!

  • Cloudspotting on Mars

    Clouds are both drivers and products of a planet’s climate. How does this work on Mars? Join us as we unlock the secrets of the red planet’s atmosphere, which is so different from Earth’s.

    Learn how you can get involved

    A bare orange-brown rocky cliff or outcropping with a rounded top fills most of the picture. Above it the sky is grey with a scattering of white, diffuse clouds.
    A Mars mesospheric cloud observed from the Martian surface by NASA's Curiosity rover. [Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS].

Discover More about Mars

A full globe view of reddish Mars featuring Valles Marineris - which looks like a huge gash on the planet.

NASA Mars Resources

Find a wide collection of Mars activities, videos, animations, graphics, and online interactives.

Explore Mars Resources
A realistic, animated video shows the progression of Mars rovers from a small microwave-sized Sojourner rover to the SUV-sized Perseverance rover. The final frame shows a sample return rocket liftin off from the Martian surface.

The Evolution of a Martian

Watch the evolution of NASA's Mars rovers, from Sojourner to Perseverance.

Watch The Evolution of a Marian
A woman wearing glasses works at a computer in mission control.

Connected to Curiosity

In this Mars Report, Curiosity engineer Reidar Larsen takes you inside the uplink room where the team talks to NASA's Curiosity rover.

Watch Connected to Curiosity
Family playing Explore Mars! A Rover Game board game

Explore Mars! A Rover Game

In this cooperative board game, players work together to program a rover on Mars to successfully complete its mission. Players must collect all four data samples before the treacherous environment damages the rover beyond repair!

Play Explore Mars
This map, as of October 2024, shows Perseverance's traverse path of over 18.65 miles, with marked locations where 24 samples were collected of rock and regolith as well as one air sample.

Perseverance's Path

Track the path of NASA's Perseverance rover NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover as it treks up a steep route up Jezero Crater’s western wall, collecting samples that may contain signs of ancient microbial life.

Watch Perseverance's Path
A learner gives commands to another learner who is blindfolded and is navigating a obstacle course.

Exploring the Solar System: Mars Rovers

In this activity, learners must work together to navigate a large obstacle course, similar to how scientists and engineers communicate with rovers to explore distant worlds.

Explore the Solar System
red and blue streaks of Martian clouds over text

Do Mars Science

Join the citizen science project Cloudspotting on Mars to help scientists identify clouds in the Martian atmosphere.

Learn more about Cloudspotting
Six chocolate candy bars cut into a cross-section to resemble rock formations

Describe Rocks Like a Scientist

Learn how scientists study rocks on Earth and other planets and then conduct your own analysis using cutaways of candy bars as "rocks."

Learn More About Rocks
An image of Mars with the text Mars Sample Return montage over it.

See NASA's Mars Samples

View the Mars rock samples collected by NASA's Perseverance rover.

View Mar's Rock Samples

Mars on Your Wall

Download this image of the red planet or other NASA Mars posters in the series, all linked from this page.

Download Options

Curiosity Chronicles

Download this free NASA graphic novel exploring the history of the search for signs of life and habitability in our solar system.

Read Curiosity Chronicles

Mars Ingenuity Helicopter in 3D

Interact with this interactive 3D model of the Ingenuity helicopter that flew 72 times on Mars.

3D Ingenuity Model

Explore our other featured images

A vivid aurora borealis in shades of purple, green, and pink illuminates the night sky, reflected on a calm body of water with a silhouette of rolling hills in the distance. NASA logo and text 'National Aeronautics and Space Administration' are visible in the upper corners.

January 2025

Auroras
A digital NASA image depicting a sequence of asteroids arranged in a curved trajectory against a black background. The NASA logo appears in the upper right corner, and the text 'National Aeronautics and Space Administration' is visible in the upper left. The bottom left corner includes the URL 'www.nasa.gov.'

February 2025

Asteroids
Computer monitor displaying a vibrant scientific visualization with blue, red, and green cell-like patterns.

March 2025

Space Radiation
Air and Ocean Views

April 2025

Air and Ocean
Cool as Ice

May 2025

Mars
Colorful composite image of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, showing intricate, glowing filaments in blue, red, green, and yellow. Captured using NASA’s James Webb and Chandra telescopes, the image reveals expanding shockwaves and stellar debris from the exploded star, set against a star-filled background.

June 2025

Supernova

July 2025

Our Sun
This face-on view of spiral galaxy NGC 628 is split diagonally, showing observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in the top left portion of the image and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in the bottom right portion. JWST�s observations combine near- and mid-infrared light, while HST�s observations showcase visible light. Complementary views show predominantly stars (HST) and obscuring dust (JWST). In JWST�s high-resolution infrared images, the gas and dust stand out in stark shades of orange and red and show finer spiral shapes with the appearance of jagged edges, though these areas are still diffuse. In HST�s images, the gas and dust show up as hazy dark brown lanes, following the same spiral shapes. HST�s images are about the same resolution as JWST�s, but the gas and dust obscure a lot of the smaller-scale star formation. Image and text credit: NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), Canadian Space Agency (CSA), Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (University of Oxford), Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) Team

August 2025

Galaxies
Thinning Arctic Sea Ice

September 2025

Arctic Sea Ice
Jupiter's moon Io appearing golden-tan against the blackness of space, half the moon bathed in shadow, half in light, bisected vertically, with mountain peaks and volcanos pockmarking the surface.

October 2025

Jupiter's Moon Io