Mars HiRISE Image: Well-Speckled Polar Dunes “These barchan (crescent-shaped) sand dunes are found within the North Polar erg of Mars. This type of dune provides a great record of the wind environment when they formed and moved: barchan dunes’ horns point downwind. Although the question of present-day sand motion is still open, it appears possible that these dunes are active (when not covered in frost) as their crestlines are very […]

Photo: Opportunity Rover at Santa Maria Crater As Seen From Mars Orbit “HiRISE acquired this image of the Opportunity rover on the Southwest rim of Santa Maria Crater on New Year’s Eve 2010, or Sol 2466 of the rover’s surface mission. Opportunity is imaging the crater interior to better understand the geometry of rock layers as a means of defining the stratigraphy and the impact process. Santa Maria is a […]

Features musical contribution from Gorkha. Captioned and spotlight images from HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Highly explosive. See http://uahirise.org for more.

This image was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. USGS Dune Database Entry (ESP_014426_2070) Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona Larger image and further information.

“This is an image of Earth and the Moon, acquired at 5:20 a.m. MST on 3 October 2007, at a range of 142 million kilometers, which gives the HiRISE image a scale of 142 km/pixel and an Earth diameter of about 90 pixels and a Moon diameter of 24 pixels. The phase angle is 98 degrees, which means that less than half of the disks of the Earth and Moon […]