Texture Planet 🛰️ The Red Planet offers a trove of textures in images captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which launched in Aug. 2005. While previous cameras on other Mars orbiters could identify objects no smaller than a school bus, MRO’s UAHiRISE camera can spot something as small as a kitchen table. Note, images are enhanced by researchers to show terrain and mineralogical detail. Swipe through these unique features: 1. The northern plains of Arabia Terra have craters that contain curious deposits with mysterious shapes and distribution. It’s suspected that these features formed by sublimation of ice-rich material. The terraces might represent different periods of sublimation. Perhaps the larger craters penetrated to a water table between 45 and 60 meters below the surface and were flooded after formation. Image description: A turquoise colored surface has a crater on the left side outlined in a gold color. Smaller craters dot the right side of the image, also det...