Where is Gale Crater on Mars?
Gale sits at 5.37° south, 137.81° east, a few degrees below the Martian equator. It formed on the boundary between the southern highlands and the northern lowlands, on ground that already sloped down towards the north, and that slope is thought to be part of the reason its northern floor and rim sit roughly one to two kilometres lower than the southern side. It is named after Walter F. Gale, an Australian astronomer.
How big is Gale Crater, and what is Mount Sharp?
Gale is 154 kilometres across, excavated by an impact more than 3 billion years ago. At its centre stands a layered mound about 90 kilometres wide: Aeolis Mons officially, Mount Sharp informally, after the geologist Robert P. Sharp. NASA gives its height as about 5 kilometres above Curiosity's landing area, and elsewhere as 5.5 kilometres above the crater floor.
The mound is what remains of sediment that once filled at least part of the crater. Material from the rim was carried in by fans, deltas and the wind, and Curiosity's results show that lakes and streams came and went here at some point between about 3.8 and 3.3 billion years ago, building the lower layers. Erosion later cut the fill back, leaving those layers exposed as bands along the mountain's lower slopes.
What has Curiosity found in Gale Crater?
Curiosity landed on 6 August 2012 (UTC), still the evening of 5 August in California, on the crater floor north of the mountain. Its first drilled sample, a mudstone called John Klein, showed that ancient Mars could have supported microbes: the rock held clay minerals and several of the key chemical ingredients for life. The rover has been climbing Mount Sharp since 2014, and on 26 August 2026 it passed one kilometre of height gained.
The landing point is also a destination of its own in OrbitStudio, named Curiosity, at 4.59° S, 137.44° E. It lies inside the crater, about 51 kilometres north-north-west of the centre point, so a model of the whole crater already includes the ground the rover set out from. Choose the Curiosity destination to centre a model on the landing point instead.
What does Gale Crater look like as a 3D print?
It reads at true scale. Frame the 154-kilometre crater to fill a model 200 mm across and a kilometre of height becomes about 1.3 mm: Mount Sharp comes out roughly 6.5 mm tall and about 115 mm wide. Because the mound is so broad, its slopes are gentle; 2× to 3× makes it read as a mountain rather than a swelling.
What it cannot show is the rover. Curiosity is about three metres long, and each elevation sample in the Mars data covers 463 metres, so the rover is roughly 150 times smaller than a single sample, which on this print is about 0.6 mm. You get the floor it landed on and the mountain it has been climbing, not the vehicle.
What is OrbitStudio?
OrbitStudio turns real NASA elevation data into 3D-printable models. You pick a region of Mars on a globe or a flat map, choose a jigsaw puzzle or a solid ornament, and get ready-to-print files with terrain and borders already separated and coloured. No CAD, no mesh repair. The heights come from the laser altimeter on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, MOLA, at up to 463 metres per pixel.
Trying it is free and needs no account: pick a region, generate it and turn it around in 3D. Downloading the model — STL files and pre-coloured 3MF files for Bambu Studio or OrcaSlicer — uses one credit from a pass. The generator covers the Moon too.
Other landmarks
The night sky, too
StellarMesh, from the same maker, turns the sky over any place, on any date from 1900 to 2100, into a 3D-printable star map. Its STL is free.