Giant dunes in a dune sea inside a Martian crater
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 17, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, inside a thirty-mile-wide dune sea, or erg, that sits in the center of the floor of 80-mile-wide Russell Crater.
That erg is interesting in that it appears the dunes get larger and larger as you move from the perimeter to its center. Thus, the dunes in the picture are called mega-dunes, about 200-feet-high. They dwarf the smaller dunes at the erg’s edge.
This picture was taken as part of a long term monitoring program to track the coming and going of seasonal dry ice frost on these dunes. It is summer when this picture was taken, so there is relatively little visible frost, though the bright blue areas in the color strip could possibly be the last remnants from winter. In winter, data suggests the entire surface of these dunes is covered by dry ice frost.
As the location is at 54 degrees south latitude, it likely sits at the northernmost edge of the southern dry ice mantle that in winter covers each of the Martian poles, down to about 60 degrees latitude.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 17, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, inside a thirty-mile-wide dune sea, or erg, that sits in the center of the floor of 80-mile-wide Russell Crater.
That erg is interesting in that it appears the dunes get larger and larger as you move from the perimeter to its center. Thus, the dunes in the picture are called mega-dunes, about 200-feet-high. They dwarf the smaller dunes at the erg’s edge.
This picture was taken as part of a long term monitoring program to track the coming and going of seasonal dry ice frost on these dunes. It is summer when this picture was taken, so there is relatively little visible frost, though the bright blue areas in the color strip could possibly be the last remnants from winter. In winter, data suggests the entire surface of these dunes is covered by dry ice frost.
As the location is at 54 degrees south latitude, it likely sits at the northernmost edge of the southern dry ice mantle that in winter covers each of the Martian poles, down to about 60 degrees latitude.
