Strange circular dunes on Mars spotted in these NASA photos
By Robert Lea published about 6 hours ago
The sand dunes were imaged as part of a program to see how frost melts on the Red Planet in late winter.
An image of almost perfectly circular sand dunes on Mars taken by the HiRISE camera. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona)
Planetary scientists have captured an image of near-perfectly circular sand dunes on the surface of Mars. While sand dunes across the Red Planet come in a wealth of shapes and sizes, such well-defined circles are unusual.
The slight asymmetry in the sand dunes shows their steep sides are orientated towards the south. The University of Arizona, which operates the High-Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRise) camera used to take the image, pointed out in a statement that this indicates sands are blown southwards, though the Martian winds may be variable.
The image was taken on November 22, 2022, at a latitude of 42.505 degrees and a longitude of 67.076 degrees. It comes as part of a series of pictures taken by the HiRise camera that orbits Mars on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft.
The collection of images is being used to monitor how frost recedes and melts on the Martian surface as the Red Planet reaches the end of its winter season. Illustrating this, while this image appears frost-free a similar image of the same sand dunes previously taken shows what they looked like while still covered in frost.
More:
https://www.space.com/mars-reconaissance-orbiter-circular-sand-dunes
= new reply since forum marked as read
I thought it was the MOON that was made of Swiss cheese.
