HiRISE images

A Piece of Mars: This 0.96x0.54 km (0.60x0.34 mi) scene shows two sets of bedforms (dunes), each aligned in different directions. The more closely-spaced set has sharper crests, and it's superposed on top of (and it is therefore younger than) the more widely-spaced set. Like a previous post I wrote, the younger set has cannibalized sediment from the older set (although in aeolian geology we say it has "reworked" the sediment). If you click on the image, you might be able to convince yourself that some internal bedding from the older set is being exposed by erosion, but it's hard... read more ❯

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 affect the wind, like pebbles in a stream. Either the sand is diverted around the crater, or the rim produces turbulence that increases erosion (or possibly both at different times). I like the dunes that are disrupted as they migrate into the crater. (HiRISE ESP_037948_1645, NASA/JPL/Univ. of Arizona) read more ❯

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 were flung out during the impact have little "tails". These tails show that wind from the upper right blows sediment toward the lower left: some of it gets trapped behind the boulders (and other topographic projections), and some of it is the dark sand that got trapped inside the crater. (HiRISE ESP_045397_1885, NASA/JPL/Univ. of Arizona) read more ❯

A Piece of Mars: This 480x270 m (0.3x0.17 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 of windblown bedforms. The larger ones (the "comb" shafts) are very old, now inactive windblown features. The smaller ones (the "comb" teeth) are ~2 m apart, and they extend downwind (eastward) from the older bedforms, which effectively serve as filters that block winds from the west (left to right), allowing only the northerly or southerly components of most winds to... read more ❯

A Piece of Mars: In this 480x270 m scene (0.3x0.17 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 bedform). They're old: they're eroded by winds blowing from the bottom to the top of the frame (exposing layers on the upwind side), and if you look carefully you'll see some craters superposed on them. The craters don't have any obvious ejecta blankets, which suggests they're not that young either, so there's been enough time for the ejecta to erode... read more ❯

A Piece of Mars: This scene (800x450 m or 0.5x0.28 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 that were carved by stuff eroding from the outcrops and falling downhill, just like on Earth. Beneath that are some finer stripes: this time the straight lines are made by a combination of wind blowing sand into ripples (from upper left to lower right) and gravity elongating the ripples downslope (stretching them from upper right to lower left). (HiRISE ESP_044997_1755... read more ❯

A Piece of Mars: Here's a tiny bit (0.69x0.39 km or 0.43x0.24 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 out on the crater floor. On the upper right is a much older deposit of stuff that piled up at the bottom of the lake that once, more than 3.5 billion years ago, filled the crater. Those lake deposits are so easy to erode that they've been worn down by the wind (see those bedforms there?) to the point that... read more ❯

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 for glacial activity). Here's yet one more swipe at the ground, scouring off bright dust to reveal darker terrain underneath. (HiRISE ESP_044511_2005, NASA/JPL/Univ. of Arizona) read more ❯

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. Sometimes it's because of the wind interacting with the shape of the pile, and sometimes it's because of the trajectories of moving grains as the wind blows them along the ground. Here's an example of three types adjacent to each other: 1) a big dune on the left (migrating towards the right), which is covered in 2) smaller ripples, and... read more ❯

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 4.6x2.6 km (2.8x1.6 mi); the conical hill is 1.4 km (0.89 mi) wide. Sand-laden wind from the right is blowing streamers of dunes around the hill, which leaves a wake that stretches downwind. Some of the luckier hills on Mars have lovely dunes scarves like this, slowly shifting over the centuries as the wind brings in more sand. (HiRISE ESP_044258_1715 NASA/JPL/Univ. of Arizona) read more ❯