A Craterful of Cracks

The northwest quadrant of a frost-filled crater on Mars. Original image ESP_042895_2495; credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.
The northwest quadrant of a frost-filled crater on Mars. Original image ESP_042895_2495; credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

Here’s a view of a section of a crater on Mars filled with a lacework of bright spidery fractures, acquired on Sept. 20, 2015 with the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The crater is approximately 3 miles (5 km) wide and located in Mars’ north polar region, and its old, infilled interior has undergone countless millennia of freeze/thaw cycles that have broken the surface into polygons of all sizes, outlined by frost-filled cracks.

The fractured segments get increasingly more compressed closer to the crater rim, which contains the outward freeze expansion.

According to the image description from the HiRISE team:
The crater rim constrains the polygon formation within the crater close to the rim, creating a spoke and ring pattern of cracks. This leads to more rectangular polygons than those near the center of the crater. The polygons close to the center of the crater display a more typical pattern. A closer look shows some of these central polygons, which have smaller polygons within them, and smaller polygons within those smaller polygons, which makes for a natural fractal! 

See a wider view of the imaged region here.

Source: HiRISE/University of Arizona