Mars Orbiter snaps fresh photo of Curiosity exploring Mars

The feature that appears bright blue at the center of this scene is NASA's Curiosity Mars rover amid tan rocks and dark sand on Mount Sharp, as viewed by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on June 5, 2017. The rover is about 10 feet long and not really as blue as it looks here. (Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona)

The Curiosity rover has been on the surface of Mars since August 6, 2012 and continues to analyze objects and beam back useful information to NASA. But it's hard to imagine the scale of the task unless you can visualize the job Curiosity is undertaking. NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) just gave us a pretty good idea, though.

A new image captured by the MRO shows the surface of Mars where Curiosity is currently hard at work climbing the lower section of Mount Sharp. NASA exaggerated the color in the image as a way of highlighting the different materials present in the surface, but it also highlights Curiosity as a tiny blue rectangle.

You can see the zoomed image above, and full image below:

The image was captured on June 5 using the High resolution Imagine Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. for NASA. What it shows is just how tiny the car-sized Curiosity rover is on the landscape and why it is so important for it to be able to pick out interesting objects as it travels.

In that regard, Curiosity recently received an upgrade allowing it to intelligently pick its own targets.

When Curiosity initially went to work on Mars it was up to NASA to direct it what to analyze using the ChemCam. When communication wasn't possible, Curiosity would randomly analyze objects which resulted in a 24 percent success rate. Last year, NASA installed the Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS) software on to the rover allowing it to use AI to intelligently scan the area and locate high value targets to analyze. With AEGIS, the success rate has now increased to 94 percent!

So while the tiny speck that is Curiosity continues its journey across the vast landscape of Mars, know that it is doing so more efficiently than ever.

This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.