Ancient Ridges

Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Look­ing like the closeup of an elephant’s hide, polyg­o­nal ridges form odd geo­met­ric pat­terns on Mars.

Explore the odd land­scape in the Gordii Dor­sum region of Mars taken from NASA’s HiRISE cam­era aboard Mars Recon­nais­sance Orbiter. Sci­en­tists think that the ridges may have orig­i­nally been sand dunes that hard­ened. Although they don’t know yet how the dunes became fos­silized. Ground­wa­ter may have some role in the geol­ogy of this area of Mars. As you wan­der across these ridges near the equa­tor of Mars, you can see that wind plays a big role in shap­ing the land­scape. What other shapes do you see in this image? Share your story by leav­ing a com­ment below.

Launched with MRO in 2005, HiRISE is one of six instru­ments aboard the space­craft orbit­ing Mars. HiRISE’s cam­era can see objects on the sur­face as small as a beach ball. The instru­ment also offers 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.