PIA17587: 'Murray Buttes' at Foot of Mount Sharp on Mars 
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</p><p>This view taken from orbit shows a cluster of small, steep-sided knobs called "Murray Buttes," on the planned route for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity to reach the slopes of Mount Sharp.
</p><p>The scene covers a patch of ground about 0.8 mile (1.3 kilometers) across. North is up. The largest buttes in the group are about the size of a football field and the height of a goal post. Darker ground at upper right and lower left is part of sand dunes along the northern edge of Mount Sharp, within Gale Crater. Murray Buttes is located at a gap in that band of dunes, making passage through this area an attractive access route to the mountain slopes just south of this scene.
</p><p>Curiosity's science team chose the informal name Murray Buttes in tribute to Bruce Murray (1931-2013), an influential advocate for planetary exploration who was a member of the science teams for NASA's earliest missions to Mars and later served as director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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The image is a portion of an observation made by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. A scale bar of 100 meters (328 feet) is provided at lower left.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
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