Tag: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, enhanced, and rotated so that north is to the top, was taken on May 30, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

This mound is small, only about 150 to 600 feet high, depending on where you mark the base. The science team labels the curved black arcs that cover the mound’s northern slopes as “small scale lobes,” suggesting they think these curves mark the foot of multiple small landslides, or more accurately described as “mass-wasting events,” as instead of an avalanche of discreet boulders and rocks, the slide is comprised of mud-like material sliding downhill en masse.

The black material at the foot of these slides as well as on the mound’s peak and south and eastern flanks is a bit more puzzling. The overview map below provides one possible explanation, but leaves us with other more tantalizing possibilities.
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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 3, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The white dot on the overview map shows the location, on the northern interior wall of Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system. The scientists took this image to get a good look at those canyon walls. I am highlighting the image because it provides a good way to illustrate the monumental scale of this vast canyon.

The inset on the overview map includes an orange dotted line, following the likely route for a trail along the nose of this ridge, going from the rim to the canyon floor. The picture to the right shows only one small section of that ridge trail, near the top. And yet, from the upper left to the lower right of the photograph a hike along that ridgeline would cover 2.2 miles and descend about 4,500 feet, a descent somewhat comparable to hiking into the Grand Canyon though dropping much more steeply. On either side of you the slopes would drop off from 1,600 to 2,000 feet.

To hike from the top of the rim to the canyon floor however would be far more challenging and be even more spectacular. The length of that orange dotted line is about 17.3 miles, with the total elevation drop about 23,000 feet — 3,000 feet greater than climbing the highest mountain in the U.S., Mount McKinley in Alaska.

Think about it. Along this part of Valles Marineris the elevation difference between the canyon floor and the rim is routinely much greater than the height of America’s tallest mountain. Every hike down into that canyon along the north wall would present a similar challenge. And from this point that northern canyon wall extends more than 650 miles westward and about 250 miles eastward. That’s a lot of Mount McKinley’s lined up in a row!

With these scales, it is at present difficult to imagine what the view from that rim would be like. You would see farther and deeper than most places on Earth, on a planet with a far thinner but more dusty atmosphere.

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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 4, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The scientists label this “Fluvial processes inside crater,” an apt description based not only on the small section of the full image to the right, but on the full image itself. The entire surface of the crater floor’s western end appears filled with glacial material, in many places twisted and warped by past slow motion movements.

I picked out the area in the picture because of its particularly warped nature. It appears as if the material in the higher elevations to the upper right have been flowing downward, and in the process have pushed the glacial debris on the crater floor to the southwest.

It also appears that in the higher locations the near surface ice has been sublimating away, giving the surface a corroded look.
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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 5, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this “irregular cellular structures on crater floor.” Located at 46 degrees south latitude in the Martian southern cratered highlands, we are likely looking at glacial debris that has been significantly corroded, the near surface ice sublimating away in patches because the dirt and dust that protects it has for some reason done a poor job.

In this case however the sublimation has produced these very strange features, very different than corroding subsurface ice features seen elsewhere on Mars. Reminds me of peeling paint, but even that analogy falls short.
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For original images go here and here.

Cool image time! The two pictures to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, were taken more than two decades apart by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The show a specific spot on the Martian south pole ice cap, at a location where there is also a perennial cap of dry ice that is also slowly shrinking in size.

The top picture was taken on May 14, 2007, the first close-up of this location. At the time the science team titled it “Fast Evolution of Landforms on the Southern Residual Caps,” which suggests that even then they had a sense from one earlier MRO picture that these strange forms were changing. As a result, scientist have used MRO to monitor this site repeatedly over the years, taking dozens of images of this location on a regular basis to track changes, both seasonally and over years.

The bottom picture is the most recent, taken on May 3, 2026. If you compare the two pictures closely, you can see that all these depressions have grown in some manner over the past two decades. (The blobs you see are all depressions. Optically your mind might make them appear as humps, but they are actually places where the cap’s top layer of dry ice has sublimated away.)
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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 1, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this picture “Thermal Anomaly in Young Lava Flows”. The anomaly, indicated by the arrow, is the distinctly blue floor of the unnamed small 300-foot-wide crater about a third of a mile east of that 30-foot-high mesa. According to MRO guidelines [pdf] for interpreting the colors the camera produces:

Frost and ice are also relatively blue, but bright, and often concentrated at the poles or on pole-facing slopes. Some bedrock is also relatively bright and blue, but not as much as frost or ice, and it has distinctive morphologies.

The guidelines say more, but based on this information it suggests the floor of that crater is unusually cold, able to hold frost and ice. The picture was taken during the Martian winter, so seeing frost inside this crater at this time is possible, though its location, deep inside the dry equatorial regions of Mars where no near surface ice is generally found, tells us that if this is frost, it is truly unusual, deserving the description of “an anomaly.”
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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on May 3, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this a “crater on debris covered glacier.” The crater, the dark spot in the upper center, is only about 450 feet across. The impact apparently took place onto this glacial slope, and since then the glacier has continued to flow downhill (as indicated by the arrows), flowing around the denser material pounded down by the impact.

The elevation loss within this image is about 300 feet, along a distance of just under two miles. How long it took this glacial material to flow this much however is unknown. Nor is it known when this happened. The orbital data so far of all Martian glaciers suggests they are at this time inactive, neither growing or shrinking.
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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and expanded to post here, was taken on April 2, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled simply as a “terrain sample”, such images are usually taken not as part of any specific research project, but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule. The camera team needs to take pictures at a regular cadence to maintain its proper temperature.

When they have such a gap, they try to find interesting things to photograph, and usually succeed. In this case we are looking at what I think the scientists dub “brain terrain,” a feature unique to Mars that is thought related to near surface ice and its sublimation, though at present the origins of brain terrain remain murky. The scale is approximately 100 meters across the width of this picture.

However, the location of this brain terrain makes any conclusions about its origin difficult.
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Glacier country in the Martian northern mid-latitudes.

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Today’s cool image gives us another nice example of the ample availability of near surface ice on Mars, even if it might take a bit of processing to extract it from the dust and soil. The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on March 31, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The picture captures in detail most of the floor of a 5.8-mile-wide unnamed crater, located in the northern mid-latitudes of Mars, in a 2000-mile-long strip I like to call glacier country, because practically every image taken there shows extensive glacial features. The white dot on the overview map above shows the location within that strip, with the inset showing the full crater, as well as the surrounding terrain.

The softness of this landscape strongly suggests a topsoil well impregnated with ice. The crater’s rim is itself very soft and subdued, suggesting melting and sublimation over time.

The material in the floor of the crater resembles peeling paint, which in this case suggests the ice there has been sublimating away as well. Nonetheless, there remains a lot under the surface. Future Martian colonists will certainly come to this region to gather ice for their own purposes.

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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on February 23, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the science team calls “layers exposed around [a] streamlined feature”.

The elevation difference between the mesa top on the left and the canyon floor on the right is about 1,000 feet. The layers are the terraces stepping downward along that drop.

What makes these layers interesting is how they have been exposed. The material that makes up the layers appears very sandy and delicate, so it breaks away it very small pieces, just like sand on a beach. The result is this feathery look. If you look close you can see that some small craters have been partly obliterated by that erosion, with their existence only marked by their remaining rim, on the high side.
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