This beautiful landscape scene may be reminiscent of sandy deserts on Earth but it’s actually a valley slicing into the frozen ice of Mars’ north pole as seen by NASA’s Mars Odyssey, soon to become the longest-operating spacecraft on or around the red planet. The image above was created from several images taken by Odyssey’s…
Category: Mars
Permanent Freeze
No it’s not Pan’s labyrinth, it’s a HiRISE image of a portion of Mars’ south polar ice cap showing frozen mesas made of layers of carbon dioxide ice. During the winter months on Mars – which is considerably colder than Earth – carbon dioxide is deposited as frost in the upper latitudes and evaporates…
Fear a-Flying
Part of a bulk data release from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter (available at ftp://psa.esac.esa.int/pub/mirror/MARS-EXPRESS/HRSC, posted on unmannedspaceflight.com by user peter59) this wonderful image shows Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons, in orbit against the backdrop of the planet’s limb. The dark, irregularly-shaped moon is shown in amazing clarity, giving a very nice…
The World with the Dragon Tattoo
A serpentine shape twists across the floor and walls of a canyon on Mars, suggesting the form of a dragon snaking across a clouded sky. This image from the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows light-colored material deposited onto the darker-toned surface, possibly through a flow of some sort, in a corner…
Northern Exposure
Here’s a look at Mars’ north polar ice cap as seen by ESA’s Mars Express orbiter on September 30, 2010, edited by astrophotographer and digital artist Mike Malaska. The original image was taken from an altitude of 6,627 miles above Mars. See how he created this image on his Flickr photostream here, and check out…
March of the Barchans
Shaped like huge shark teeth, barchan sand dunes coat the floor of Herschel Crater in this false-color image from the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. (See the full-sized map-projected image here.) Barchan dunes (pronounced “barkan”) are found in many places on Mars as well as on Earth. They are formed by the pile-up…
Solving a Martian Mystery
“The Red Planet bleeds. Not blood, but its atmosphere, slowly trickling away to space. The culprit is our sun, which is using its own breath, the solar wind, and its radiation to rob Mars of its air. The crime may have condemned the planet’s surface, once apparently promising for life, to a cold and sterile…
A Close-Up on Oileán Ruaidh
Here’s a processed image of Opportunity’s latest point-of-interest, the toaster-sized iron meteorite Oileán Ruidh (Gaelic for “Red Island”, pronounced “ay-lan ru-ah”) by Stuart Atkinson. This pitted, metallic chunk of rock is the subject of the rover’s most recent side trip on its way to Endeavour crater, whose mountainous rim is now well within sight across…
Dust ‘Til Dawn
This image shows a view of Mars taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in August of 2001, after a planetwide storm had completely covered it with windblown dust as fine as cigarette smoke. (The image has been color-edited and magnified 2x from the original by Gordan Ugarkovic.) These dust storms can arise unexpectedly and at…
Face to Face
Remember the old photo of the mysterious “face on Mars” taken by the Viking spacecraft in 1976? Well here’s the same landform, imaged by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Just goes to show that things aren’t always what they seem. The surprisingly human-looking “face” was really just a trick of the light…
This Week in Space
Season 1, episode 23: SpaceX issues a financial challenge to the big space contractors, last shuttle launches slip, video diary from Mars 500 crew, IKAROS’ successful solar sail, kids discover Martian cave, John Glenn joins the save shuttle fray, Cassini takes a dip in Titan’s atmosphere, new Hubble images show star formation, extreme exoplanet weather,…
Over The Edge
I was just checking out this HiRISE image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and thought I’d tweak it and share it here…it’s a rare and very nice in-action shot of fine ice and dust particles streaming over the edge of a sheer 2,300-foot-high cliff in the north polar region of Mars. Billowing clouds of…
Lights in the Dark 