Here’s an image that always blows my mind: it’s our planet as seen by the exploration rover Spirit on March 8, 2004, 63 Martian days into its mission. It’s the first image of Earth taken from the surface of another planet. The official description says: The image is a mosaic of images taken by the…
Tag: Mars
Crater in Chaos
Here’s an intriguing image of a dune-filled crater on the edge of a plateau on Mars, taken by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on April 27, 2010. The heavily-eroded face of the plateau is the result of millennia of wind erosion, which most likely provided the source of the material which has…
Back That Thing Up
For those of you who haven’t seen this yet, it’s a very neat animation made from three days’ worth of images from the Opportunity rover as it climbed away from the rim of Victoria crater in late August 2008. The “shaky cam” look gives it a very you-are-there documentary feeling, especially since the height of…
Avalanche!
It’s always exciting to catch geologic surface events in action on Mars, reminding us that the red planet isn’t just a museum piece but a very active place! The image above is from the HiRISE camera on the Reconnaissance Orbiter showing dust clouds billowing up nearly 200 feet at the base of an ice cliff…
Lady’s Choice
Scientists prove it: a girl knows how to make up her mind. The image above shows the first target object – that football-sized layered rock – autonomously chosen by the Mars rover Opportunity on March 4. Opportunity selected the rock after taking a series of wide-angle panoramic images of the area and using her new…
When the Wind Blows
A huge 800-plus-foot-wide dust devil swirls across the parched plains of Mars in this image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera. Heading westward when the image was taken, it casts a tall diffuse shadow toward the northeast. This photo is part of a study of the knobby surface texture of the region in the…
Heeeere’s Phobos!
After much anticipation, this just in: an amazingly detailed image from the March 7 flyby of Phobos! As Phil Plait might say, click to emphobosize. 😉 See more info and a couple more similar images on the ESA’s Mars Express site. Phobos sure has an interesting surface texture. It’s almost as if boulders have been…
Flight Over Candor Chasma
If you could climb into a helicopter and fly over a valley on Mars, what would it look like? Well (regardless of the fact that a helicopter probably wouldn’t work very well in the thin Martian air) it would probably be a lot like this – a beautiful animation sequence created by Adrian Lark showing…
An “Outie” Crater
This image from the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows an “inverted” crater within an ice-rich debris apron just south of a mountain on Mars. Ice deposits beneath and within the soil – recently discovered using ground-penetrating radar – cause the terrain to move, distorting the landforms within it over time. As the…
Phobos Flyby Success
No need to fear, Phobos is here! (That’s a particularly bad pun on Phobos being the Greek god of fear……er…nevermind.) Yesterday’s flyby of Mars’ tiny moon was a success, as the animation below shows using actual data from the event. This latest pass only utilized the ASPERA instrument, which studies the way Phobos interacts with…
Slope Streaks
This image from the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) shows streaks of dark-colored material lining the walls of a trough (left side) and tapering out onto its floor. One of the few currently active geologic processes on Mars, this streaking may be caused by finely-grained soil moving downhill in much the same…
Groovy Rock
Another image from Opportunity showing some of the heavily-textured rocks ringing Concepción crater in fascinating detail, color-calibrated by Stuart Atkinson for an approximation of Martian natural lighting. You can clearly see here the layered structure of the rocks, their angular shapes, the interesting “crust” that coats their sides as well as the small stone “berries”…
Lights in the Dark 