Crater-causing collisions are thought to have excavated underground minerals that were then exposed on the crater peaks.
As a mobile laboratory, Curiosity will focus first on Gale Crater's 14, 700-foot-high central peak.
When the Apollo 15 astronauts wanted to name their lunar landscape after him, they fixed on Dandelion Crater.
Bike around the edge or cycle into the crater on Route 40, passing the Carpentry, a unique rock formation that resembles wood.
Scientists believe magma is now at a very shallow level and hot cracks in the dome are opening which is causing rockfalls on to the south crater floor.
BBC: Mount St Helens spews out steam and ash on 5 October 2004
The two paratroopers took a grip on the prisoner's arms and lifted him into the crater and set him down on his side, curled up in a fetal position in the round hole.
The third sequence focuses on the 3.4-mile (5.5-km) diameter crater that dominates one hemisphere on the asteroid.
On the horizon are the crater walls, now a ring of tree-covered mountains and national parks.
The vehicle is currently sitting in a small depression on the floor of Gale Crater known as Yellowknife Bay.
This activity could throw up rock fragments that would land in the crater itself or on to the flanks of the volcano.
Not to be outdone by its brother, Curiosity has found the first evidence of an ancient streambed on Mars near the Gale Crater.
Its first grainy, wide-angle images showed its own left rear wheel parked on the surface of Gale Crater near the equator of Mars, close to the foot of a three-mile-high mountain it aims to explore in months to come.
The instrument has established that winds generally blow east-west on the floor of the crater - something of a surprise to researchers who thought the rover's position close to the northern slopes of Gale's big central mountain might drive winds in a prevailing north-west direction as air moved up and down the peak in a day-night cycle.
He wished to look into Pichincha's crater, just as on an earlier journey he had descended into Vesuvius.
This color image from NASA's Curiosity rover shows part of the wall of Gale Crater, the location on Mars where the rover landed on Aug. 5, 2012 PDT.
Studies at the Gale Crater landing site have been on hold since the beginning of March after engineers discovered a problem with Curiosity's computer memory, possibly caused by space radiation.
The overall goal of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission is to use 10 instruments on Curiosity to assess whether areas inside Gale Crater ever offered a habitable environment for microbes.
ENGADGET: Curiosity rover finds radiation levels on Mars are safe for humans
After initial study of some so-called basaltic rocks near its landing site, Spirit embarked on a 10-week drive across the crater, more than a mile wide, to reach the Columbia Hills.
The war will go on around him as he sits in the small crater left at the mortar's point of impact.
Over in Gusev Crater, Spirit had been running low on energy as the martian dust began to cover the rover's solar panels.
Ken, with colleague Marco Di Lorenzo, has built a number of panoramas of Gale Crater that give us a wider perspective on the Curiosity vehicle's Martian home - literally.
Sharp a three-and-a-half-billion-year-old peak in the middle of the crater, with layered deposits like a textbook on Martian prehistory.
Later on in its mission, Spirit will investigate a large crater at its Gusev Crater landing site called Bonneville Crater.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Rover sets Mars distance record
The perfect conical peak, the 4, 040m crater looms over the Gulf of Guinea and can be summited on a three-day trek.
The damaged spacecraft was lifted out of its crater by helicopter and moved to a sterile "clean room" on the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah following the crash.
They picked the rock in Gale Crater, which the robot has been exploring since it landed there on Aug. 5, because they hope it holds evidence of wet environmental conditions long ago.
I've stood at a crater in rural Tanzania and taken a call from Northern Ireland, yet on the shores of Lough Neagh and in the Sperrins, I'm unreachable.
Still on her knees, the woman, shuddering with sobs, started to crawl through the dirt toward the crater.
The base will actually be built inside a real crater and the daytime temperature of -23 degrees Celsius is like a nice summer's day on Mars.
Opportunity made it across four metres (12 feet) on its drive and is now poised to continue observing parts of the rocky outcrop that sticks out of the crater where it has landed.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Rover sets Mars distance record
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