Ripples and waves of sediment undulate around stone mesas in this high-resolution (false-color) photo of a crater in Mars’ Arabia Terra, a region at the boundary of highland and lowland. These eroded escarpments are thought to be the shores of an ancient ocean. Now all that laps against them are these serpentine sand dunes.

This and images like it are taken with a high-resolution camera (HiRISE) aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and processed at the University of Arizona. These photos can resolve objects as small as a few feet in diameter on the Martian surface, giving us an unprecedented bird’s-eye-view of the varied geology of the red planet.

More on this image here.

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona