Dust from Mars Drilling: Tailings and Discard Piles

This image shows the first holes into rock drilled by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, with drill tailings around the holes plus piles of powdered rock collected from the deeper hole and later discarded after other portions of the sample had been delivered to analytical instruments inside the rover. The image was taken by the telephoto-lens camera of the rover's Mast Camera (Mastcam) instrument in early afternoon of the 229th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (March 29, 2013). The site is on a patch of flat rock called "John Klein" in the "Yellowknife Bay" area of Mars' Gale Crater.