Results tagged “HiRISE”

This circular crack is very odd-looking. When you zoom in to HiRISE scale, the crack looks a lot like a graben.

Hydrae Chasma is a deep, circular depression approximately 50 kilometers across, situated between Juventae Chasma to the north and the large canyon system Valles Marineris to the south.

The objective of this image is to examine the exposure of thin layers along the walls of a few-kilometer-wide valley in Sinus Meridiani.

While HiRISE has imaged slope streaks before, bright streaks are not as common as dark ones, so they're of high interest.

The Nili Fossae region contains some of the best exposures of ancient bedrock on Mars. Ancient bedrock can be tilted, folded, and generally complicated and difficult to understand, but the center of this image shows a stack of nearly horizontal layers.

These dark sand dunes in the North polar region, basking in the sunshine of late spring, have shed most of their seasonal layer of winter ice. A few bright ice deposits remain sequestered in "cold traps" shadowed from the sun on the poleward-facing side of the dunes.

Mars occasionally has cloudy weather. We intended to take a picture of the bright ice-covered dunes that are faintly visible through these thin clouds, but weather forecasting on Mars is just as challenging as on Earth. Where the clouds are thin, the remaining bright winter ice is visible, protected in shallow grooves on the ground, in addition to covering the dunes.

A towering dust devil casts a serpentine shadow over the Martian surface in this stunning, late springtime image of Amazonis Planitia.

Shown here a well-preserved impact crater about 6 or 7 kilometers wide from rim to rim. By well-preserved we mean that the crater has a sharp rim, deep cavity, impact morphologies preserved down to scales of tens of meters, and little sign of infilling or degradation by a range of processes (other impacts, volcanism, tectonism, icy flow, aeolian erosion and infill, etc.).

In the winter, Martian dunes north of 70 degrees latitude are covered by a seasonal layer of carbon dioxide ice (dry ice). In the spring as the ice sublimates (goes directly from solid to gas) numerous seasonal phenomena are observed.

The 40-kilometer diameter unnamed crater (49 degrees North, 21 degrees East) in this image is located west of Lyot Crater and north of Deuteronilus Mensae in the Northern Plains of Mars. As seen in the subimage, gully systems in the central structure have eroded underlying layers (undercutting) that are less resistant to erosion than the surface rock of the central structure.