Mars this week...

 Photo courtesy of NASA

This almost looks like something out of one of Hollywood's famous 'dusters', rather than a telephoto image from Mars showing the kind of landscape which is
the eventual destination of Curiosity, on its trip to show us that Mars was once very much like Earth at the same age.

The accompanying story with this image can be found here and is well worth reading. The only point in it with which I disagree is the comment about sending people there. The complications of keeping them alive and well in such a hostile environment, basically a sub-zero desert, are both large and expensive. As we are proving with robots like Curiosity, it is much cheaper and safer to send our machines. And it's becoming obvious that those machines can tell us plenty.