NASA Mars Odyssey THEMIS Image: Nili Patera Dune Field

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Context image credit: NASA/Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) Team
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Our topic for the weeks of April 4 and April 11 is dunes on Mars.

We will look at the north polar sand sea and at isolated dune

fields at lower latitudes. Sand seas on Earth are often called

“ergs”, an Arabic name for dune field. A sand sea differs from

a dune field in two ways: 1) a sand sea has a large regional extent,

and 2) the individual dunes are large in size and complex in form.

This VIS image shows a dune field within Nili Patera,

the northern caldera of a large volcanic complex in Syrtis Major.

[Source: ASU THEMIS Science Team]

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) was developed by Arizona State University, Tempe, in collaboration with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote Sensing. The THEMIS investigation is led by Dr. Philip Christensen at Arizona State University. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the prime contractor for the Odyssey project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Arizona State University