# @nasa on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/CnXtmjbpHHR
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/3152893-nasa-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/13d3473707.jpg
- **Posted:** 2023-01-13T21:30:51.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** NASA (@NASA) — https://gondola.cc/NASA

## Caption

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 detailed in gold.

2. Small channels formed on the floor of the much larger Kasei Valles, one of the largest outflow channels on Mars. The enormous floods that formed such channels sometimes flowed around either side, forming islands with a streamlined shape. Image description: A cratered surface in black and white, while horizontal ripple formations twist and turn around the foreground.

3. A dune field located along the western margin of Hellas Planitia, the floor of a giant depression in the Southern Hemisphere of Mars. Scientists take multiple pictures of the same dune fields to see if they can detect changes that indicate that the dunes are moving. Some Martian dune fields do shift and move under the present-day environmental conditions, but at a rate that is typically much slower than dunes move on Earth. Image description: Three dunes diagonally line the image. The dunes are grey within each crease and transition to a violet blue color at the peak of the dune. Small ripples texture each dune, and white sediments dot the dunes along the top right.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

#NASA #Mars #MRO #Space #Planets #SolarSystem #Textures

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## Tags

nasa, textures, planets, space, mars, mro, solarsystem

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