October 13, 2014
A piece of Mars: This looks like a pair of eyes looking at us. It’s really some small brown hills, two of which (the “eyes”) are surrounded by dark gray sand that has blown into scours as the wind interacts […]
October 6, 2014
A Piece of Mars: This field of 2 m wide sand ripples has a dark splotch in the middle (the scene is 300×225 m or 984×738 ft). The splotch is the peak of a low hill that straddles the classification […]
September 30, 2014
A piece of Mars: These funny shaped dunes were formed by winds blowing from two directions – one from the top of the frame and one from the upper right. Both winds make steep slopes (slip faces) on the downwind […]
September 22, 2014
A piece of Mars: There are two sets of ripples here: tan ones and gray ones, each oriented to a different wind (scene is 300×225 m, or 984×738 ft). The gray ones sit on top of the tan ones, so […]
September 15, 2014
A piece of Mars: Wind flow on Mars can be quite dramatic. Here, a single wind-sculpted hill stands 1.5 km (0.93 mi) wide and 600 m (1970 ft) high (color shows elevation). That sounds big, but vastly larger is the […]
September 8, 2014
A piece of Mars: The swirly candy stripes in these big dark dunes are layers inside that have been made visible by wind erosion (the scene is 1.5×0.9 km, or 0.93×0.56 mi). It’s rare to see the inside structure of […]
September 3, 2014
A piece of Mars: This scene (509×382 m, or 1670×1253 ft), aside from showing some lovely rippled dunes, has many car-sized boulders in it. Some are surrounded by ditches in the sand, like little moats. Why? The sand is blown […]
August 25, 2014
A piece of Mars: This scene (3.9×2.5 km or 2.4×1.6 mi) shows a surface carved by two different winds: one blowing from the right and one blowing from the bottom right. They’ve formed overlapping sets of streamlined rocks called yardangs. […]
August 18, 2014
A piece of Mars: The two shadowed hills in the upper part of this frame (497×373 m or 1631×1224 ft across) rest on a flat plain covered in large ripples. On the plain the ripples are aligned north-south, formed perpendicular […]