HiRISE images

A Piece of Mars: The focus of this 0.96x0.96 km (0.6x0.6 mi) scene is one of many two-faced dunes on Mars. The bright sunlit slope is one face, formed recently by wind blowing from the upper right. The dark shaded slope is the other face - it's a little older, formed by wind blowing from the left. Together these two winds alternate, probably in different seasons, forcing the sand into a needle-shaped point that carries sand in a direction that is, give or take, the sum of those two winds. Two-faced dunes like this are rare on Earth, as winds... read more ❯

A Piece of Mars: How do you tell when a planetary landscape shows Mars, instead of Mercury or the Moon or Europa? The easiest way to tell is to look for both craters and dunes, like what's shown here in this 640x360 m (0.4x0.22 mi) scene. Not all martian landscapes have either feature, and there are some other worlds that do have both (Earth, Titan, maybe Pluto, and probably Venus but we need better data...), but it's a pretty good bet that if you see both features together, you're looking at Mars. Anyway, in this lovely view, the dark gray... read more ❯

A Piece of Mars: Get out your 3D blue/red glasses (or look here for a 2D version if you can't find them). This is a 3.2x1.8 km (2x1.13 mi) scene showing dark dunes carving lanes 50-70 m (165-230 ft) deep into a stack of brighter sedimentary layers. Over time, the sand wears down the rock into yardangs, the elongated remnants of rock the sand didn't manage to reach. Here we see the process ongoing; perhaps in a few million years there will be nothing left but a few streamlined peaks. Those murdering basterds [sic]. (HiRISE ESP_034419_2015, NASA/JPL/Univ. of Arizona) read more ❯

A Piece of Mars: There's a lot of evidence for both fast and slow movement in this 480x270 m (0.3x0.17 mi) scene. The tortoise: The rippled surface at the top is high ground: the top of a dune. Wind pushes the ripples toward a steep sunlit slope, creating long thin, dark avalanches that slowly inch the slipface forward. At the bottom of the slope, which is shielded from winds blowing from the top, ripples have been formed by wind blowing from the left. The hare: Oblivious to both the slow progression of ripples and dunes, 5-25 m wide dust devils... read more ❯

A Piece of Mars: Mars rarely does anything without drama. Long ago in this 0.96x0.54 km (0.6x0.34 mi) scene, large ripples formed and then, presumably, lithified (turned into rock). Some time after that, an impact formed the crater in the center, throwing debris into an ejecta blanket that covered the lithified ripples. That ejecta blanket sat around long enough to acquire some smaller impact craters of its own. Since then, most of that ejecta blanket has eroded away, exposing the ripples to view once again. (HiRISE ESP_011699_1910, NASA/JPL/Univ. of Arizona) read more ❯

A Piece of Mars: Nicholas Steno was a 19th century geologist, who came up with some principles that are still used today to guide interpretation of exposed sedimentary rocks. The principles seem a bit obvious, but then some of the most profound principles can be like that. Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society describes them in more detail here, with really good examples. You can use these principles to do forensics on a landscape, to see what happened and when. You can see all three principles at work in this image. #1: Stuff makes horizontal layers. (This isn't always true, e.g.,... read more ❯

A Piece of Mars: A low, broad dune occupies the center of this 800x450 m (0.5x0.28 mi) scene, blown by a dominant wind towards the lower left. The slip face on the lee side has several small avalanches, formed as the slope oversteepens (this is how dunes crawl along the surface). Upwind, among other fainter lines, is a prominent bright line: it is a former slip face of this dune, possibly formed from a thick accumulation of bright dust (maybe there was a big dust storm that year). Farther upwind, another dune slowly approaches. (HiRISE ESP_033955_2065, NASA/JPL/Univ. of Arizona) read more ❯

A Piece of Mars: Higher ground is to the left. You're seeing a tan layer sandwiched between two gray layers in this 0.96x0.54 km (0.6x0.34 mi) scene. Large ripples have accumulated in the lowest area to the right, which is the floor of an old river channel. Ripples have also formed on the gray upper layer. But not the middle tan layer - maybe it's too fine-grained to erode into sand grains, or maybe it erodes too slowly to allow any eroded sand grains to pile into ripples before they're blown away. (HiRISE ESP_048196_1995, NASA/JPL/Univ. of Arizona) read more ❯

A Piece of Mars: Martian spiders, or araneiforms, are geological structures found at high latitudes on Mars. The dark splotch with branching arms in this 0.48x0.27 km (0.3x0.17 mi) scene is a good example. They form in the springtime, when bright frost still covers a darker sandy soil, but some sunlight filters through the frost to warm the underlying surface. Sublimation of gas (under the frost but just above the soil) creates enough pressure that little explosions occur like dry geysers, punching through the frost and blowing up sand that then falls back to the surface as a dark splotch.... read more ❯

A Piece of Mars: The dunes climbing over a rocky surface in this 0.96x0.54 km (0.6x0.34 mi) scene are mostly yellow because they're covered (and therefore kept immobile) by dust. The crest of one dune, though, shows recent activity: dark sand has been pushed by the wind up the lower right side, and then shot (cannonball-style) over the brink, where it slowly piles up on the upper left side. This pileup is called grainfall, because that's what the sand grains have done here (rather than sliding downhill, avalanche-style, which is called grainflow). There's a dune on the left side of... read more ❯