A thousand Martian spiders

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Mar­t­ian spi­ders scurry around the sur­face in this image from NASA’s HiRISE cam­era.

Explore the spi­dery ter­rain image. What sto­ries or pic­tures do you see? Leave a note below.

In real­ity, no spi­ders are found on Mars. This lacy ter­rain is unlike any­thing we see on Earth.These strik­ing, and a bit scary, pat­terns, may be caused by freez­ing and thaw­ing action on Mars. As car­bon diox­ide ice is heated by the Sun it goes directly to a gas in a process called sub­li­ma­tion. Sci­en­tists spec­u­late that gas flows along these chan­nels until it encoun­ters a vent. The gas escapes scat­ter­ing dust that is car­ried along. Sci­en­tists call this type of ter­rain “araneiform,” or “spider-like”.

Launched with Mars Recon­nais­sance Orbiter, or MRO, in 2005, HiRISE is one of six instru­ments aboard the space­craft orbit­ing Mars. HiRISEs cam­era can see objects on the sur­face as small as a beach ball. The instru­ment can also offer sci­en­tists stereo views of the sur­face. When com­bined with dig­i­tal ter­rain mod­els, sci­en­tists can “drape” the imagery to pro­duce real­is­tic land­scapes to study and explore.

Comments

Jerczey 16-02-2011, 06:22

I see these “spi­dery” images and I can’t stop see­ing the resem­blance it has when I see images of the human body in a micro­scope… the blood cells and things like that…
We are defin­i­tively stars son’s…

Regards,
Jerczey.

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