NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE Images: April 2, 2014

– Ring of Cratered Cones http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_035098_2065

Interestingly, the area around the ring has few cones: did water or steam flow to the crater and make that zone less fertile?

– Mission 2020: A Candidate Landing Site in Gusev Crater http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_035164_1655

As we did for Phoenix in 2008 and the Mars Science Laboratory in 2012, HiRISE has been imaging landing sites for a potential rover mission in 2020.

– An Irregular Crater Intersecting Graben in Tractus Albus http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_035226_2090

This crater is very irregularly shaped and might suggest that some underlying liquid was present that made it so elongated after the initial impact.

– An Elevated Crater in the Apollinaris Mons Region: Volcanic or Impact-Related? http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_035863_1710

When a circular depression is visible on the summit of a mound or elevated landform, careful analysis is needed to identify if it was created by an impact or by volcanic activity.

All of the HiRISE images are archived here: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/

Information about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is online at http://www.nasa.gov/mro. The mission is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, of Denver, is the prime contractor and built the spacecraft. HiRISE is operated by the University of Arizona. Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp., of Boulder, Colo., built the HiRISE instrument.