NASA Mars Odyssey THEMIS Image: Sand Sheet on Crater Floor

Image Context:


Context image credit: NASA/Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) Team
[ Find on map: Javascript version ]

[ Find on map: CGI version ]

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.

As with yesterday’s image, this dune field is located

inside a crater, in this case an unnamed crater at 26 degrees North latitude.

In this VIS image the dunes are coalescing into a sand sheet,

note the lack of dune forms to the north of the small hills.

The presence of ridges and hills in the area is affecting the

dune shapes.

[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