Categories: Mars

Rock Bridge on Mars

A landform on Mars that looks like a naturally occuring bridge across a chasm. Credit: NASA/JPL/U of Arizona/ colorization by Stu Atkinson.

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The HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took an image of a thin channel, and a portion of it contains a naturally occurring bridge over the chasm. Kelly Kolb from the HiRISE team says it is probably a remnant of the original surface, the rest of which has collapsed downward. It isn’t likely there’s a opening underneath the formation, but if there were, it would look very similar to a rock bridge formation found in Jordan in the Wadi Rum, the Valley of the Moon. See an image below.

Kolb also said this is unlikely to be a channel formed by a running water, as there are no obvious source or deposit regions. The channel is probably a just a collapse feature.

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And see the full HiRISE image of the thin channel, found in Mars northern hemisphere between some “knobs” called Tartarus Colles, below.

Any chance the Mars rockbridge could look like this one in Wadi Rum, Jordan -- also known as the Valley of the Moon?

Small Winding Channel in Tartarus Colles. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

For more information about this image on Mars, see the HiRISE website.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/