lfenton

May 16, 2016

Wind shadow

A Piece of Mars: There’s a dune field migrating past a 230 m (755 ft) diameter crater, creating a 1.6 km (1 mi) long “shadow” that’s empty of dunes. Why? The rim of the crater pokes up just enough to […]
May 9, 2016

Craters and wind

A Piece of Mars: This 90 m (295 ft) crater impacted into a windy, cratered plain. It’s now partly filled with dark sand, but where did that sand come from? Looking closely you’ll see that many of the boulders that […]
May 2, 2016

Giant “combs” on Mars

A Piece of Mars: This 480×270 m (0.3×0.17 mi) scene shows a herd of 100-300 m fine-toothed combs grazing on the surface of Mars. Wait, what? No, it’s not really combs. This is actually a landscape covered by two sets […]
April 25, 2016

Old ripples

A Piece of Mars: In this 480×270 m scene (0.3×0.17 mi), there are a bunch of “ripples” spaced by 5-20 m (the quotes are because we don’t know yet if these are ripples, dunes, or some other new kind of […]
April 19, 2016

Stripes by wind and gravity

A Piece of Mars: This scene (800×450 m or 0.5×0.28 mi) is a steep slope, with high rocky outcrops on the upper right and both gullies and ripples heading downslope to the lower left. The wider, brighter stripes are gullies […]
April 11, 2016

Windy windows

A Piece of Mars: Here’s a tiny bit (0.69×0.39 km or 0.43×0.24 mi) of Jezero crater, one of the candidate landing sites for the Mars 2020 rover. On the bottom and left is high-standing volcanic terrain, former lava that flowed […]
April 4, 2016

The wind paints

A Piece of Mars: For the last few billion years, the wind has (by far) moved more sediment around on Mars than any other geological process. Not tectonics, volcanism, fluvial activity, or impact cratering (although a case has been made […]
March 28, 2016

Three types of windblown piles of stuff

A Piece of Mars: The wind blows different sorts of sediment in different ways. Ultimately they pile up because some oddity in nature makes one spot accumulate more sediment than other spots, allowing that windblown pile of stuff to grow. […]
March 16, 2016

Dune shadows

A Piece of Mars: Normally I post in color, but sometimes you need to back out to the grayscale images to see the big awesome things. This scene is 4.6×2.6 km (2.8×1.6 mi); the conical hill is 1.4 km (0.89 […]