NASA’s Curiosity rover has taken stunning new photos of a giant “spider web” zigzagging across the surface of Mars. One of these images revealed a never-before-seen egg-like spheroid covering a vast structure. Scientists have a hard time explaining them.
For the past eight months, Curiosity has been scrutinizing a series of interconnected rock ridges known as “boxwork” on the slopes of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater. These ridges cover areas up to 12 miles (20 kilometers) in diameter and were formed billions of years ago when ancient Martian groundwater seeped beneath the planet’s surface. They were first discovered by an orbiter in 2006, but have remained largely unexplored until now.
This web-like structure is not to be confused with the infamous “Martian spider.” Created when carbon dioxide ice sublimates beneath the Red Planet’s surface, it is a series of geological features that look like swarming arachnids when viewed from above. (These fake spiders have recently been recreated on Earth, and a similar “wall demon” was also discovered on Jupiter’s moon Europa.)
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NASA released the first photos of Curiosity’s boxwork in June 2025, shortly after reaching the rocky ridge. But on Monday (February 23), authorities released two more snapshots showing the structure in more detail.
One of these photos, taken on September 26 of last year, shows a ground-level view of a ridge 3 to 6 feet (1 to 2 meters) above the surface of Mars. But a second enlarged image taken on August 21 revealed that some of these bumps were covered in small, irregularly shaped lumps, or nodules, that had never been seen before.
These nodules bear a striking resemblance to the tiny spheroids on the surface of the mysterious “spider egg” rock discovered last year in Jezero Crater by NASA’s Perseverance rover, but their origin is unknown. And researchers are struggling to explain exactly how the tiny box-shaped “eggs” formed.
“We still cannot fully explain why the nodules appear where they exist,” Tina Seeger, a planetary scientist at Rice University in Houston who is leading the study of Curiosity’s boxwork, said in a statement. “Perhaps the ridge was first consolidated by minerals, and subsequent episodes of groundwater left nodules around it,” Seeger said. However, further work is needed to confirm whether this is the case.
But while the nodules and boxwork have an eerie biological appearance, there is no suggestion that they have any direct connection to extraterrestrial life.
spider web on mars
The boxwork consists of intersecting ridges of mineral-rich rock scattered across the surface of Mars. According to the American Speleological Society, similar but smaller structures are found on Earth, mostly in caves, and are formed when calcite-rich water flows through rocks and eventually erodes, similar to how stalagmites and stalactites form.
But Mars’ box structure was shaped by the ferocious winds that blow across the planet’s surface. “The bedrock beneath these ridges likely formed when groundwater trickled through the rocks, leaving behind minerals that accumulated in their cracks and crevices and hardened into a cement-like form,” NASA representatives previously wrote. “Years of sandblasting by Martian winds wore away the rocks but not the minerals, revealing a network of internal resistant ridges.”
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The research team is particularly interested in Mt. Sharp’s boxwork patch. That’s because it was formed in isolation, perched surprisingly high on the side of a mountain, and has hints at the planet’s mysterious watery past.
“Seeing boxwork this high up on the mountain suggests that the water table was quite high,” Seeger said. This suggests the water in the area may have “lasted much longer than we thought,” she added.
The researchers hope that further investigation will also reveal the specific conditions that formed these structures, and whether conditions were favorable for potential ancient Martian microbes.
“These ridges likely contain minerals that crystallized underground, where salty liquid water flows and would have been warmer,” Kirsten Seebach, a Curiosity mission scientist at Rice University who also studied the region, previously said. “Early Earth microbes may have been able to survive in similar environments, which is why this is such an interesting place to explore.”
uneven terrain
The latest phase of Curiosity’s mission is yielding fascinating results, but it’s also proving to be one of the most difficult.
The boxwork is probably the most difficult terrain a car-sized robot has had to traverse since it landed in Gale Crater in 2012, Ashley Stroup, a systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement. The spacecraft will need to balance along the ridges “like a highway” and avoid sliding “into the potholes” between them, he said.
The task of controlling the rover, first discovered in late 2024, has also become increasingly difficult due to a large hole in one of its wheels.
“There’s always a solution,” Stroup said. “Just try a different path.”
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