topography
July 13, 2017
A Piece of Mars: I often use JMARS to visualize Mars data sets, especially images. They’ve recently updated their 3D layer, allowing folks to make lovely vistas by overlaying DTMs with images. I’m new at this, but I’ll experiment and […]
April 17, 2017
A Piece of Mars: Water carved this ~800 m (0.5 mi) wide channel billions of years ago. The water dried up, and since then it’s been sand that flows through here (from the right), building up lovely dunes. A single […]
March 27, 2017
A Piece of Mars: Sand pours in from the top of this 1.95×1.95 km (1.21×1.21 mi) scene. The sand piles up and up (here ~115 m or 377 ft high), but ahead (at the bottom) is a mountain poking up. […]
March 20, 2017
A Piece of Mars: In a recent post (Dunes in a Colorful Hole), I showed some dunes crawling over layered terrain, with a view that looked a lot like some desert regions of Earth. Here’s another spot on Mars (0.95×1.1 […]
February 27, 2017
A Piece of Mars: Gray dunes have migrated over reddish rock, moving toward a narrowing cleft surrounded by tall tan cliffs. Bright lines on the dunes are exposed internal layers (bones of the dunes, really) that show you where the […]
April 19, 2016
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 […]
March 9, 2015
A piece of Mars: Ripples form endless chevrons in this 600×450 m (0.37×0.30 mi) scene. It’s really the crest of a dune that connects all the vertices in the chevrons, making that straight line that runs nearly vertical through the […]
February 2, 2015
A piece of Mars: What happens to dunes as they move over rough terrain? This is what a barchan looks like on a relatively flat surface. If the hills are smaller than the dune, then it does its best to […]
January 12, 2015
A piece of Mars: This 600×450 m (1969×1476 ft) scene has a complex sedimentary history. How are bearded craters and dunes formed? They weren’t always bearded. At some point, a deposit of bright material accumulated on this surface, and was […]