The small blue dot is Curiosity.

From orbit, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been cataloging the landscape of Mars in exquisite detail for more than a decade. Occasionally it photographs something not at all Martian.

On June 5, the orbiter passed over Mount Sharp, the mountain inside a crater where NASA’s Curiosity rover has been exploring since 2012. The color image, taken from a distance of 169 miles, is the combined view of three wavelength bands — red, blue-green and infrared. Those wavelengths bring out differences in the materials on Mars’s surface, but produce a scene quite different in hue from what the human eye would see.

This false-color combination makes Curiosity, which is about 10 feet long and nine feet wide, pop out as a bright blue in the terrain of tan rocks and patches of dark sand. (The rover usually has a hue like an unwashed metallic car.)

The Reconnaissance Orbiter has been taking pictures of Curiosity about every three months to monitor movements in dunes, erosion of slopes and other changes in the landscape.