This is not body art, nor an evocation of the Star Wars planet "Tatooin", but a true colour view of sand dunes on Mars. This amazing image was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The region shown is about 1 km across and is located in the centre of a large crater at mid-northern latitude on Mars. The graceful grey swirls are caused by dust devils frequent in deserts on both Earth and Mars. These kind of mini-tornadoes remove locally a thin layer of reddish sand covering the dark grey basaltic ground of the crater. The aligned grey lines in the bottom part of the image are probably caused by sand sliding down the dune face again, revealing the darker colour of the basaltic sand in the crater.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.
CERN Courier
Dec 7, 2009
Picture of the month
About the author
Compiled by Marc Türler, INTEGRAL Science Data Centre and Observatory of Geneva University.