NASA's Curiosity rover has sent home a quiet, striking view of a Martian morning.

The new image shows early sunlight falling on jagged cliffs called yardangs. The rover took it on Aug. 11 at 8:30 a.m. local Mars time, about an hour after sunrise, Gizmodo reported. NASA stitched six pictures together. Unlike most rover photos, the team did not adjust the colors, so the scene keeps its soft early-morning look.

The cliffs are more than pretty. "The bright craggy peaks in the distance are a rock layer that is quite different in appearance from all the layers the rover has driven through so far," said Ashwin Vasavada, the mission's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, CBC News reported.

Vasavada said the layer "looks out of place. It's the wrong color, the layers tilt at an odd angle, and it almost appears plastered on." One idea is that it formed from ash thrown out by ancient volcanoes. Over long ages, wind then carved the rock into ridges.

The layer likely formed about 3 billion years ago and stretches about 10 miles across the northwest side of Mount Sharp, the mountain Curiosity has been climbing since 2014. It sits on top of older layers that had worn away first, Vasavada told CBC.

Curiosity landed in Gale Crater in 2012. The rover has now climbed about 0.6 miles, the most height ever gained on Mars. Each layer of the mountain records a different time in the planet's past. Scientists have used them to learn about lakes and streams that covered the area when Mars was warmer and wetter.

"It's like Earth, but it's definitely Mars," Vasavada said, noting the orange sky and the blue shades of the sunrise.

Once the rover arrives at the cliffs, it will use its tools to study the rock up close and test ideas about how the layer got there.

What we know: Curiosity is closing in on an unusual rock layer that formed billions of years ago.
What we don't: What created the layer, and exactly when the rover will reach it.