ripples
January 2, 2018
A Piece of Mars: The dunes (or maybe they’re ripples) in this valley appear to be fuzzy (the view is 625×775 m, 0.39×0.48 mi). They’re not really fuzzy, but it’s not actually clear what’s going on. They seem to have […]
December 4, 2017
A Piece of Mars: To the upper right of this 0.85×0.6 km (0.53×0.37 mi) scene is a flat-lying plain strewn with large ripples. To the lower left is a rugged hill with gray rock laced with white veins (this might […]
November 27, 2017
A Piece of Mars: The rippled darker patch in this 600×600 m (0.37×0.37 mi) scene is the former site of a sand dune. This is one of a few “dune corpses” found just upwind of a dune field in Holden […]
October 30, 2017
A Piece of Mars: The wind on Mars likes to make textiles (unfortunately the term geotextiles is already taken for other purposes). This 1×0.6 km (0.62×0.37 mi) scene shows two different sets of ripples. The larger set has straight to […]
September 5, 2017
A Piece of Mars: The sharp line in this 0.625×0.625 km (0.39×0.39 mi) scene is the crest of a long dune in Mars’ southern hemisphere. The sunlit side is also the lee side: the bright streaks are thin sand avalanches […]
August 14, 2017
A Piece of Mars: Along the right side of this 0.5×0.5 km (0.31×0.31 mi) scene is the rim of a crater – the stripes are layers exposed (and then perhaps draped by falling ejecta) as the crater formed. To the […]
June 5, 2017
A Piece of Mars: Having a bad day? You’re in good company with these dunes in this 0.96×0.48 km (0.6×0.3 mi) scene. The gray barchanoid dunes are covered in ripples, as the wind valiantly tries to push the sand to […]
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 […]
April 10, 2017
A Piece of Mars: Sometimes I just want to show the interior of a dune field, because it’s full of waves: ripples and dune crests, slip faces, all of which signs of movement. The dunes in this 0.67×0.47 km (0.41×0.29 […]
February 21, 2017
A Piece of Mars: This is the crest of one of the largest dunes on Mars (0.5×0.5 km or 0.31×0.31 mi). The wind mostly blows from the right, slowly pushing sand up the windward slope. But frost accumulates on (and […]
January 30, 2017
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 […]
January 23, 2017
A Piece of Mars: Sometimes in the floors of small craters, the wind blows in from several directions to produce odd polygon-shaped dunes that look like crochet (maybe Mars is making sweaters for its craters – it is, after all, […]