Curiosity, the Martian rover, has just finished taking its latest album of the red planet. NASA has stitched up the album together into a glorious panorama. The pictures have revealed some petrified sand dunes, which could have some clues about Mars' ancient past.

The formation of sand dunes has taken place by deposits of sandstone. With passage of time due to blowing wind, the sandstone formation has taken a crossbedding structure, where sets of bedding lie in angles to each other. This formation is quite similar to the ones that can be found in the Southwest regions of the US, like those in Utah.

Besides the discovery of the sand dunes themselves, these structures are likely to have clues and more details about Mars' ancient environment. The formation of the structure overlies a layer of mudstone, which is an occurrence generally takes place in a lake environment. Thus, this fact has strengthened theories of ancient Mars' large bodies of water.

Curiosity has been examining such mudstone deposits regularly. For example, the rover discovered such deposits in the base layer of Mars' Mount Sharp a little more than a year ago.

Curiosity began capturing this new collection of images on previous August 27. The activity has taken two weeks and 94 meters to complete. The rover will keep on digging for sandstone samples from this huge land formation this month. Once the rover is done, then they will be analyzed to look for clues related to what happened to the place that theorized to be a largely aquatic environment that turned it into the red planet that it is today.