Category: Mars

Lava tubes down the side of Pavonis Mons. Image credit: ESA. Click to enlarge
This photograph shows one of Mars’ three great shield volcanos: Pavonis Mons. The image was taken by ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, and shows a top view of the extinct volcano as it rises 12 km (7.5 miles) above the surrounding plains. Scientists believe the linear features are lava tubes that were created when the volcano was active. Similar to here on Earth, lava forms a crust on top while molten rock continues to flow under the surface. The longest tube extends over 59 km (37 miles).

This image, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express, shows Pavonis Mons, the central volcano of the three ‘shield’ volcanoes that comprise Tharsis Montes.

ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft obtained this image using the HRSC during orbit 902 with a ground resolution of approximately 14.3 metres per pixel. The image was acquired in the region of Pavonis Mons, at approximately 0.6° South and 246.4° East.

The context map is centred on Pavonis Mons, one of the three volcanoes called Tharsis Montes (the others being Arsia and Ascreus Montes, aligned with Pavonis in a line nearly 1500 km long).

Pavonis Mons, rising roughly 12 km above the surrounding plains, is the central volcano of the three ‘shield’ volcanoes that comprise Tharsis Montes. Gently sloping shield volcanoes are shaped like a flattened dome and are built almost exclusively of lava flows.

The dramatic features visible in the colour image are located on the south-west flank of Pavonis Mons. Researchers believe these are lava tubes, channels originally formed by hot, flowing lava that forms a crust as the surface cools. Lava continues to flow beneath this hardened surface, but when the lava production ends and the tunnels empty, the surface collapses, forming elongated depressions. Similar tubes are well known on Earth and the Moon.
The long, continuous lava tube in the northwest of the colour image extends over 59 km and ranges from approximately 1.9 km to less than 280 m wide.

Pit chains, strings of circular depressions thought to form as the result of collapse of the surface, are also visible within the colour image. In the northeast, there is a clear distinction between the brighter terrain at higher elevations and darker material located down slope. In the southwest, the lava tubes appear to be covered by subsequent lava flows.

By studying Martian volcanoes, scientists can obtain information regarding this intriguing planet. For example, the gradual flank slopes and the flattened, dome-like appearance of Pavonis Mons suggest that low-viscosity lava formed this volcano.

Original Source: ESA News Release

Cobbles appearing on trough floors between wind-blown ripples. Image credit: NASA/JPL. Click to enlarge
NASA’s Opportunity rover captured this photograph of the surface of Mars during its trek from Erebus Crater to Victoria Crater. The image shows exposed bedrock between large windblown sand ripples. Opportunity took the photo on April 27, 2006 during its 802nd Martian day of exploration.

As NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity continues to traverse from “Erebus Crater” toward “Victoria Crater,” the rover navigates along exposures of bedrock between large, wind-blown ripples. Along the way, scientists have been studying fields of cobbles that sometimes appear on trough floors between ripples. They have also been studying the banding patterns seen in large ripples.

This view, obtained by Opportunity’s panoramic camera on the rover’s 802nd Martian day (sol) of exploration (April 27, 2006), is a mosaic spanning about 30 degrees. It shows a field of cobbles nestled among wind-driven ripples that are about 20 centimeters (8 inches) high.

The origin of cobble fields like this one is unknown. The cobbles may be a lag of coarser material left behind from one or more soil deposits whose finer particles have blown away. The cobbles may be eroded fragments of meteoritic material, secondary ejecta of Mars rock thrown here from craters elsewhere on the surface, weathering remnants of locally-derived bedrock, or a mixture of these. Scientists will use the panoramic camera’s multiple filters to study the rock types, variability and origins of the cobbles. This is an approximately true-color rendering that combines separate images taken through the panoramic camera’s 753-nanometer, 535-nanometer and 432-nanometer filters.

Original Source: NASA News Release

Artist’s concept of Phoenix spacecraft. Image credit: NASA. Click to enlarge
NASA’s next mission to the Red Planet, the Phoenix Mars Lander, is coming together in preparation for its August 2007 launch. Engineers are now incorporating many of its subsystems, including the flight computer, power systems and science instruments. If all goes well, the spacecraft will land near Mars’ north polar ice cap, and analyze samples that it scoops up from the icy soil.

NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, the next mission to the surface of Mars, is beginning a new phase in preparation for a launch in August 2007.

As part of this “assembly, test and launch operations” phase, Phoenix team members are beginning to add complex subsystems such as the flight computer, power systems and science instruments to the main structure of the spacecraft. The work combines efforts of Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver; the University of Arizona, Tucson; and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

“All the subsystems and instruments from a wide range of suppliers are tested separately, but now we are beginning the vital stage of assembling them together and testing how they will function with each other,” said JPL’s Barry Goldstein, project manager for Phoenix.

Phoenix will land near the red planet’s north polar ice cap to analyze scooped-up samples of icy soil.

“We know there is plenty of water frozen into the surface layer of Mars at high latitudes. We’ve designed Phoenix to tell us more about this region as a possible habitat for life,” said the University of Arizona’s Peter Smith, principal investigator for the mission.

Phoenix is the first mission of NASA’s Mars Scout Program of competitively proposed, relatively low-cost missions to Mars. The program is currently soliciting proposals for a 2011 Scout mission.

The Phoenix proposal, selected in 2003, saves expense by using a lander structure, subsystem components and protective aeroshell originally built for a 2001 lander mission that was canceled while in development. The budget for the Phoenix mission, including launch, is $386 million.

The spacecraft will land using descent thrusters just prior to touchdown, rather than airbags like those used by the current Mars Exploration Rovers. As Phoenix parachutes through Mars’ lower atmosphere in May 2008, a descent camera will take images for providing geological context about the landing site.

The robotic arm being built for Phoenix will be about 2 meters (7 feet) long, jointed at the elbow and wrist, and equipped with a camera and scoop. It will dig as deep as about 50 centimeters (20 inches) and deliver samples to instruments on the spacecraft deck that will analyze physical and chemical properties of the ices and other materials. A stereo color camera will examine the landing site’s terrain and provide positioning information for the arm. The Canadian Space Agency is providing a suite of weather instruments for Phoenix.

“The propulsion system and the wiring harness have been added to the vehicle,” said Ed Sedivy, Phoenix program manager for Lockheed Martin. “We will be loading flight software onto the flight computer in the next few days. The flight software is much more mature than typical for a planetary program at this stage. As soon as the flight computer is mated up, we can apply external power to the vehicle.”

Navigation components, such as star trackers, and communication subsystems will become part of the spacecraft in coming weeks, followed by science instruments in the summer.

Phoenix will be shipped to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Florida, in May 2007, for final preparations leading up to launch. Before that, testing in Colorado will subject the spacecraft to expected operational environments. This includes thermal and vacuum tests simulating the 10-month trip to Mars and conditions on Mars’ surface. Meanwhile, the mission is preparing a test facility in Tucson for practicing and testing procedures for operating the spacecraft on Mars.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages Phoenix for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit http://www.nasa.gov . For information about the Phoenix Mission to Mars on the Web, visit http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu.

Original Source: NASA News Release

This image, taken by ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, shows the Nanedi Valles region of Mars. These steep sided channels range in width from a few hundred meters to more than 5km (3 miles) across, and look like they were formed by quickly flowing water. But their origin is debated by researchers. Some think that liquid flowed under the surface and the ground collapsed above it, while others think that water did once flow on the surface.

These images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, show the Nanedi Valles valley system, a steep-sided feature that may have been formed in part by free-flowing water.

The HRSC obtained these images on 3 October 2004 during orbit 905 at a ground resolution of approximately 18 metres per pixel. The images have been rotated 90 degrees clockwise, so that north is to the right.

They show the region of Nanedi Valles, a roughly 800-kilometre valley extending southwest-northeast and lying at approximately 6.0 degrees North and 312 degrees East in the region of Xanthe Terra, southwest of Chryse Planitia.

In the colour image, Nanedi Valles ranges from approximately 0.8- to 5.0-kilometre wide and extends to a maximum of about 500 metres below the surrounding plains. This valley is relatively flat-floored and steep-sloped, and exhibits meanders and a merging of two branches in the north.

The origin of these striking features remains heavily debated.

***image4:left***Some researchers point to sapping (erosion caused by ground-water outflow), while others suggest that flow of liquid beneath an ice cover or collapse of the surface in association with liquid flow is responsible for the valley’s formation.

While the debate continues, it seems likely that some sort of continuous flow rather than a single flooding event created these features.

By studying Nanedi Valles, scientists hope to better understand the climatic evolution of the Red Planet. The stereo and colour capabilities of the HRSC camera enable scientists to study the planet’s morphology, while researchers can analyse reflected light at different wavelengths to better recognise the various geologic units within a scene.

The colour images have been derived from the three HRSC colour channels and the nadir channel. The anaglyph image was calculated from the nadir and one stereo channel.

Original Source: ESA Mars Express

OMEGA instrument has identified clay beds which supported life in the past. Image credit: ESA/OMEGA. Click to enlarge
ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft has completed an extensive map of minerals across the surface of Mars, pointing at the places future rovers might want to search for life. This new analysis shows that lakes and oceans might have been present on Mars, but they disappeared more than 4 billion years ago. That wouldn’t have given life much time to get a serious foothold before the whole planet became a desert. So these pockets of hydrated minerals would be the best places to try and find evidence of past life.

By mapping minerals on the surface of Mars using the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, scientists have discovered the three ages of Martian geological history – as reported in today’s issue of Science – and found valuable clues as to where life might have developed.

The new work shows that large bodies of standing water might only have been present on Mars in the remote past, before four thousand million years ago, if they were present at all. Within half a billion years, these conditions had faded away.

The results come from the Observatoire pour la Mineralogie, l’Eau, les Glaces et l’Activite (OMEGA) instrument on board Mars Express. In one Martian year (687 Earth days) of operation, OMEGA mapped 90 percent of the surface, allowing the identification of a variety of minerals and the processes by which they have been altered during the course of Martian history. The maps have allowed a team of scientists, led by Professor Jean-Pierre Bibring, Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS), Orsay (France), to identify three geological eras for Mars.

The earliest, named by the authors as the ‘phyllosian’ era, occurred between 4.5-4.2 thousand million years ago, soon after the planet formed. The environment was possibly warm and moist at this time, allowing the formation of large-scale clay beds, many of which survive today.

The second era, the ‘theiikian’, took place between 4.2 and 3.8 billion years ago. It was prompted by planet-wide volcanic eruptions that drove global climate change. In particular, the sulphur these eruptions belched into the atmosphere reacted with the water to produce acid rain, which altered the composition of the surface rocks where it fell.

Finally, there was the ‘siderikian’, the longest lasting of the Martian eras. It began sometime around 3.8-3.5 billion years ago and continues today. There is little water involved in this era; instead, the rocks appear to have been altered during slow weathering by the tenuous Martian atmosphere. This process gave Mars its red colour.

The eras are named after the Greek words for the predominant minerals formed within them. The one most likely to have supported life was the phyllosian, when clay beds could have formed at the bottom of lakes and seas, providing the damp conditions in which the processes of life could begin.

However, there are still question marks. The team points out that the clay beds might have been formed underground, rather than in lakebeds.

“Hydrothermal activity below the surface, the impact of water-bearing asteroids, even the natural cooling of the planet could all have promoted the formation of clay below Mars’s surface. If so, the surface conditions may always have been cold and dry,” said Bibring.

After this initial period, water largely disappeared from the planet’s surface either by seeping underground or being lost into space. Except for a few localised transient water events, Mars became the dry, cold desert seen by spacecraft today. This new identification of clay beds on Mars provides high-priority targets for future Mars landers that seek to investigate whether Mars once harboured life.

“If living organisms formed, the clay material would be where this biochemical development took place, offering exciting places for future exploration because the cold Martian conditions could have preserved most of the record of biological molecules up to the present day,” concluded Bibring.

Original Source: ESA Portal

The large Argyre Basin in Mars’ southern hemisphere. Image credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS. Click to enlarge
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent back some new test images of the Martian surface, at a resolution of 2.5 metres/pixel. Once it reaches its final science orbit, the spacecraft will be 10 times closer to the planet, and the images will be even higher resolution. The spacecraft fired its thrusters on Wednesday to adjust its orbit so that it passed through Mars’ atmosphere. This maneuver is called aerobraking, and the spacecraft will make many of these passes over the next 6 months.

Researchers today released the first Mars images from two of the three science cameras on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Images taken by the orbiter’s Context Camera and Mars Color Imager during the first tests of those instruments at Mars confirm the performance capability of the cameras. The test images were taken from nearly 10 times as far from the planet as the spacecraft will be once it finishes reshaping its orbit. Test images from the third camera of the science payload were released previously.

“The test images show that both cameras will meet or exceed their performance requirements once they’re in the low-altitude science orbit. We’re looking forward to that time with great anticipation,” said Dr. Michael Malin of Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego. Malin is team leader for the context camera and principal investigator for the Mars Color Imager.

The cameras took the test images two weeks after the orbiter’s March 10 arrival at Mars and before the start of “aerobraking,” a process of reshaping the orbit by using controlled contact with Mars’ atmosphere. This week, the spacecraft is dipping into Mars’ upper atmosphere as it approaches the altitude range that it will use for shrinking its orbit gradually over the next six months.

The orbiter is currently flying in very elongated loops around Mars. Each circuit lasts about 35 hours and takes the spacecraft about 27,000 miles (43,000 kilometers) away from the planet before swinging back in close.

On Wednesday, a short burn of intermediate sized thrusters while the orbiter was at the most distant point nudged the spacecraft to pass from approximately 70 miles (112 kilometers) to within 66 miles (107 kilometers) of Mars’ surface.

“This brings us well into Mars’ upper atmosphere for the drag pass and will enable the mission to start reducing the orbit to its final science altitude,” said Dan Johnston of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., deputy mission manager.

After hundreds of passes through the upper atmosphere, the drag will gradually reduce the far point of the orbit until the spacecraft is in a nearly circular orbit every two hours.

After the spacecraft gets into the proper orbit for its primary science phase, the six science instruments on board will begin their systematic examination of Mars. The Mars Color Imager will view the planet’s entire atmosphere and surface every day to monitor changes in clouds, wind-blown dust, polar caps and other variable features.

Images from the Context Camera will have a resolution of 20 feet (6 meters) per pixel, allowing surface features as small as a basketball court to be discerned. The images will cover swaths 18.6 miles (30 kilometers) wide.

The Context Camera will show how smaller areas examined by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment Camera — which will have the best resolution ever achieved from Mars orbit — and by the mineral-identifying Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer fit into the broader landscape. It will also allow scientists to watch for small-scale changes, such as newly cut gullies, in the broader coverage area.

The new test images from the Context Camera and the Mars Color Imager are available online at www.nasa.gov/mro , www.msss.com/mro/ctx/images/2006/04/13/ and www.msss.com/mro/marci/images/2006/04/13/ .

For more detailed information about Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, see http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro .

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is managed by JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, is the prime contractor.

Original Source: NASA News Release

Coarse-grained layers inside Mars’ Gusev Crater. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell. Click to enlarge
NASA engineers have moved the Spirit Mars rover to a safe North-facing slope to ride out the Martian winter. Since the rover is in the Southern hemisphere, it gets much less sunlight during the Winter. This maneuver was made more difficult because its right-front wheel has stopped working – the robot is dragging it along like an anchor. Spirit requires a good angle towards the sun to catch energy from the Sun onto its solar panels. It needs to store enough electricity to run the overnight heaters that protect its electronics.

NASA’s Mars rover Spirit has reached a safe site for the Martian winter, while its twin, Opportunity, is making fast progress toward a destination of its own.

The two rovers recently set out on important — but very different — drives after earlier weeks inspecting sites with layers of Mars history. Opportunity finished examining sedimentary evidence of ancient water at a crater called “Erebus,” and is now rapidly crossing flat ground toward the scientific lure of a much larger crater, “Victoria.”

Spirit studied signs of a long-ago explosion at a bright, low plateau called “Home Plate” during February and March. Then one of its six wheels quit working, and Spirit struggled to complete a short advance to a north-facing slope for the winter. “For Spirit, the priority has been to reach a safe winter haven,” said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover project.

The rovers have operated more than eight times as long as their originally planned three-month explorations on Mars. Each has driven more than 6.8 kilometers (4.2 miles) about 11 times as far as planned. Combined, they have returned more than 150,000 images. Two years ago, the project had already confirmed that at least one place on Mars had a wet and possibly habitable environment long ago. The scientific findings continue.

Opportunity spent most of the past four months at Erebus, a highly eroded impact crater about 300 meters (1,000 feet) in diameter, where the rover found extensive exposures of thin, rippled layering interpreted as a fingerprint of flowing water. “What we see at Erebus is a thicker interval of wetted sediment than we’ve seen anywhere else,” said Dr. John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology, “The same outcrops also have cracks that may have formed from wetting and drying.”

In mid-March, Opportunity began a 2-kilometer (1.6-mile) trek from Erebus to Victoria, a crater about 800 meters (half a mile) across, where a thick sequence of sedimentary rocks is exposed. In the past three weeks, Opportunity has already driven more than a fourth of that distance.

At Home Plate, Spirit found coarse layering overlain by finer layering in a pattern that fits accumulation of material falling to the ground after a volcanic or impact explosion. In one place, the layers are deformed where a golfball-size rock appears to have fallen on them while they were soft. “Geologists call that a ‘bomb sag,’ and it is strong evidence for some kind of explosive origin,” Squyres said. “We would like to have had time to study Home Plate longer, but we needed to head for a north-facing slope before winter got too bad.”

Spirit is in Mars’ southern hemisphere, where the sun is crossing lower in the northern sky each day. The rovers rely on solar power. The amount available will keep dropping until the shortest days of the Mars winter, four months from now. To keep producing enough electricity to run overnight heaters that protect vital electronics, Spirit’s solar panels must be tilted toward the winter sun by driving the rover onto north-facing slopes. However, on March 13 the right-front wheel’s drive motor gave out. Spirit has subsequently driven about 80 meters (262 feet) using five wheels and dragging the sixth, but an initial route toward a large hill proved impassable due to soft ground. Last week, the team chose a smaller nearby ridge, dubbed “Low Ridge Haven,” as the winter destination. Spirit reached the ridge Sunday and has a favorable 11-degree tilt toward the north.

“We have to use care choosing the type of terrain we drive over,” Dr. Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu, a rover planner at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., said about the challenge of five-wheel driving. In tests at JPL, the team has been practicing a maneuver to gain additional tilt by perching the left-front wheel on a basketball-size rock.

Spending eight months or so at Low Ridge Haven will offer time for many long-duration studies that members of the science team have been considering since early in the mission, said Dr. Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, deputy principal investigator. These include detailed mapping of rocks and soils; in-depth determination of rock and soil composition; monitoring of clouds and other atmospheric changes; watching for subtle surface changes due to winds; and learning properties of the shallow subsurface by tracking surface-temperature changes over a span of months.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate.

For images and information about the rovers, see http://www.nasa.gov/rovers or http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov .

For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit http://www.nasa.gov .

Original Source: NASA News Release

This is a photograph of the unusually happy Galle Crater on Mars. ESA’s Mars Express took a series of 5 images shaped like strips which were then assembled on computer to build up a single photograph. Galle Crater is 230 km (143 miles) across, and located on the eastern rim of the Argyre Planitia impact basin on Mars.

These images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, show the Galle Crater, an impact crater located on the eastern rim of the Argyre Planitia impact basin on Mars.

The HRSC obtained these images during orbits 445, 2383, 2438, 2460 and 2493 with a ground resolution ranging between 10-20 metres per pixel, depending on location within the image strip.

The images show Crater Galle lying to the east of the Argyre Planitia impact basin and south west of the Wirtz and Helmholtz craters, at 51 degrees South and 329 degrees East.

The images of the 230 km diameter impact crater are mosaics created from five individual HRSC nadir and colour strips, each tens of kilometres wide.

A large stack of layered sediments forms an outcrop in the southern part of the crater. Several parallel gullies, possible evidence for liquid water on the Martian surface, originate at the inner crater walls of the southern rim.

Crater Galle, named after the German astronomer J.G. Galle (1812-1910), is informally known as the ‘happy face’ crater.

The ‘face’ was first pointed out in images taken during NASA’s Viking Orbiter 1 mission.

***image4:left***Its interior shows a surface which is shaped by ‘aeolian’ (wind-caused) activity as seen in numerous dunes and dark dust devil tracks which removed the bright dusty surface coating.

The colour scenes, false-colour and near true-colour, have been derived from three HRSC colour and nadir channels gathered during five overlapping orbits. The perspective views have been calculated from a mosaic of digital terrain models derived from the stereo channels.

The black-and-white high-resolution image mosaic was derived from the nadir channel which provides the highest detail of all channels. The resolution has been decreased for use on the Internet, to around 50 m per pixel.

Original Source: ESA Mars Express

First colour images from MRO. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona. Click to enlarge.
The first full colour photographs are back from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and they’re big and beautiful. The photos were actually taken in the infrared spectrum, so this isn’t what the human eye would see – the colouring was done on computer. The spacecraft was 2,493 kilometers (1,549 miles) above the surface of Mars when it captured this image. It’ll be getting much closer in the coming months, so the photos are only going to get better.

This is the first color image of Mars from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. At the center portion of the camera’s array of light detectors there are extra detectors to image in green and near-infrared color bandpasses, to be combined with the black-and-white images (from red-bandpass detectors) to create color images. This is not natural color as seen by human eyes, but infrared color — shifted to longer wavelengths. This image also has been processed to enhance subtle color variations. The southern half of the scene is brighter and bluer than the northern half, perhaps due to early-morning fog in the atmosphere. Large-scale streaks in the northern half are due to the action of wind on surface materials. The blankets of material ejected from the many small fresh craters are generally brighter and redder than the surrounding surface, but a few are darker and less red. Two greenish spots in the middle right of the scene may have an unusual composition, and are good future targets for the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, a mineral-identifying instrument on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter ( http://crism.jhuapl.edu/). In the bottom half of the image we see a redder color in the rough areas, where wind and sublimation of water or carbon dioxide ice have partially eroded patches of smooth-textured deposits.

This image was taken by HiRISE on March 24, 2006. The image is centered at 33.65 degrees south latitude, 305.07 degrees east longitude. It is oriented such that north is 7 degrees to the left of up. The range to the target was 2,493 kilometers (1,549 miles). At this distance the image scale is 2.49 meters (8.17 feet) per pixel, so objects as small as 7.5 meters (24.6 feet) are resolved. In total this image is 49.92 kilometers (31.02 miles) or 20,081 pixels wide and 23.66 kilometers (14.70 miles) or 9,523 pixels long. The image was taken at a local Mars time of 07:33 and the scene is illuminated from the upper right with a solar incidence angle of 78 degrees, thus the sun was 12 degrees above the horizon. At an Ls of 29 degrees (with Ls an indicator of Mars’ position in its orbit around the sun), the season on Mars is southern autumn.

Images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment and additional information about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/mro or http://HiRISE.lpl.arizona.edu. For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit: http://www.nasa.gov.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems is the prime contractor for the project and built the spacecraft. The HiRISE camera was built by Ball Aerospace and Technology Corporation and is operated by the University of Arizona.

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release