Windblown: ancient and recent

A Piece of Mars: HiRISE is celebrating 10 years of success by showcasing its first high resolution image, taken back in 2006. Here is a portion of it, shown at 1/4 the full resolution (the scene is 2.5×2.5 km across). I highly recommend downloading the HiRISE image viewer and looking at the whole thing, it’s an amazing landscape. The portion shown here has many different ripple-like features, formed by a wind blowing from left to right. Notice that those in the middle and middle-left are a bit fainter: these are ripple-like features that were carved into the bedrock by the wind, and they may be much older than the sharper-edged ones nearby. (HiRISE TRA_000823_1720, NASA/JPL/Univ. of Arizona)