This Video Made From Real Mars Data Will Make You Feel Like You're Flying Over the Red Planet
There are lots of incredible things you can do with data. Like make this incredible animation of the Martian surface, for example.
Remarkable Image Shows a Martian Crater With NASA's Garbage Still Inside
When NASA’s Opportunity rover landed on Mars in 2004, it settled at the bottom of a crater in an interplanetary hole-in-one shot that would make even a golf champion jealous. When the rover trundled out of its unexpected hole, it left behind its landing platform. Now, 13 years later, we’ve caught our best glimpse yet…
Incredible New Image Shows the Earth and Moon From Mars
During a recent calibration exercise, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured a remarkable view of Earth and its moon from a distance of 127 million miles (205 million kilometers). It’s so clear, you can even make out our planet’s continents.
NASA Just Released 1,000 Spectacular New Photos From Mars' Surface
It’s always a good time to get up close and personal with Mars.
Voyager's Iconic Shot of Earth and Moon Shows How Far Space Photography Has Come
Today marks the anniversary when NASA’s Voyager 1 captured both the Earth and its Moon in a single frame. For the first time, we perfectly captured the two celestial bodies we call home.
Behold The Dark Sand Dunes Of Mars
The HiRISE camera mounted on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is exploring the history of water on Mars, snapped this photo of a circular depression on the Red Planet's surface.
It's Late Spring on Mars, and the Frost Hasn't Quite Melted Yet
Just expand this image a little bit and you'll see amazing detail — that's frost forming on ripples of sand, its distinctive wrinkly appearance created by wind whipping along this slope on the inside of a Martian crater.
One Image That Reveals the Full Wonder of Martian Geology
Mars isn't just an endless stretch of dull red dirt — different parts of the planet's surface are geomorphologically distinct, with some parts boasting dunes, craters, or flood channels, while others feature evidence of avalanches, dust devil trails, and stratified terrain.
Dunes Let Us Study One Of The Universe's Fastest Geologic Processes
With a gentle rainbow of topographical changes, and the scalloped detail of active dunes, this digital terrain model is pure indulgence for the eyes. It's also part of an ongoing study on using aeolian processes to investigate sedimentation and atmospheric science on Mars.
Barchan Dunes on Mars
These dunes are a fleet of Star Fleet communicator badges (combadge), flying in formation across the Martian surface. The geomorphology of why this happens has nothing to do with Star Trek or transporter beams, and everything to do with aerodynamics.
Zumba Crater, Mars
The walls on the sides of Zumba Crater on Mars are so steep, it looks like an eyeball staring back at you from the digital terrain model. The ejecta forms a hill of red and brown around the perfectly circular blue crater floor.
A Rainbow Crater on Mars
This impact crater on Mars is decked out in rainbow colours reflecting the topography of the area. The dark blues and purple of the crater floor rapidly digs through the high-elevation red, yellow, and green of the surrounding plains.
The Mysterious Honeycomb Structures on Mars
On Mars exists a patchwork of rectangular ridges, a mysterious feature unique to the red planet. While better and better photographs narrow down the plausible theories, we still don't know exactly what created these puzzling structures.
Erosion in a Martian Crater
This well-preserved crater on Mars features evidence of mass wasting — reoccurring slope linea formation. Material is being eroded from the high-elevation crater lip, forming shifting gullies into the basin below.
This is not a glitch. It's Mars.
Light and shadow play on the ridges of sand dunes that lie cloistered in an impact crater in Mars' Noachis Terra region.
NASA's Recon Orbiter Is the Most Important Thing We've Ever Thrown at Mars
The Opportunity, Spirit, and Curiosity rovers may get the headlines for their craters clambering exploits but it's NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, quietly observing the planet turn from 178 miles up, that's most critical to our exploration of the Red Planet.
This is all the beautiful space litter left on Mars by NASA's Curiosity rover
Four months ago, NASA landed a one-ton, nuclear-powered rover on the Red Planet, scattering the Martian terrain with heaps of debris in the process. Curiosity, upon arrival, shed so much of its Entry Descent & Landing hardware that high resolution images of the planet's surface are still turning up traces of the…
NASA will attempt to photograph the Curiosity landing. From an entirely different spacecraft.
As of this posting, we are just 2 days, 12 hours, and thirty minutes away from the Curiosity rover making touchdown on Mars. We're excited. NASA's excited. Even Angry Birds is excited.
This gorgeous patch of Mars would be a great place to send future rovers
One of the best ways to learn about a planet's history is to examine its geology, so one of the things scientists look for when sending rovers to Mars is areas on the planet's surface that allow access to multiple layers of diverse and interesting rock types.
Is the Mars Ocean Hypothesis all wet?
Evidence of Mars' watery past continues to pile up, but details surrounding the extent and duration of the planet's hydrous history remain muddled — just how wet was Mars, really?
