This is John Batchelor, conversation with my good colleague, Bob Zimmerman, of curiosity, the rover on Mars as it climbs up Mount Sharp, an image that looks otherworldly and is, suggestive of what? What's there? What is it made up of? And does it evidence water or glaciers or wind?

Mars is another world, just like all the other worlds we're going to discover in time with our telescopes

and our ways of perceiving exoplanets.

This particular one is ours to deal with.

Recently, I've run across an explanation of the early days of the universe, of the solar system.

And what's significant is that there were many planets about Mars size, proto-planets, primary planets,

maybe even Earth looked like this before it took on more in the great bombardment, the accretions of

planetissimals and chunks of planets that hadn't formed. Mars is a nascent planet, and we're

looking at what happens to begin with. Mysteries of Mars. Here's Bob to describe the mad mountains of Mars, as Bob dubs them.

More of this later.

Yeah, this is one of those really cool victors that came out of curiosity this week.

It's from one of the navigation cameras.

I'm sorry, it's from the high-resolution camera on the curiosity.

And it looks in the

distance at the horizon uphill on Mount Sharp. And what you see is a plethora of hills and

mountains, a chaos of mountains. I call them Mad Mountains of Mars, because it's really

crazy looking. And so I also have a map there to give context to show what you're looking at, uphill onto Mount Sharp.

And what really is going on here is that curiosity right now is at a spot where there's a geological formation called boxwork.

That it's doing drilling, and they're trying to understand what the boxwork is.

But it's eventually going to be heading more uphill, and when it does

so, it's going to reach a section called the sulfide-bearing unit. And that's on orbital pictures,

that's an area that appears very, very white and significantly eroded. And that's what these crazy

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