Scarp Dune Blues at North Pole of Mars | NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

Scarp Dune Blues at North Pole of Mars | NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

This enhanced color image (using the red-green-blue filter) shows a group of lovely barchan dunes along a scarp (cliff) in Chasma Boreale in the North Pole of Mars. A barchan or barkhan dune is a crescent-shaped dune. Our primary goal is to track for seasonal changes over time.

These dunes were captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) using the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) instrument. MRO has orbited the Red Planet since 2006.

Image cutout is less than 1 km (under a mile) across and the spacecraft altitude was 197 km.

Malin Space Science Systems built the Mars Color Imager (MARCI), Context Camera (CTX) systems for MRO.

The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colorado. 

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Release Date: September 6, 2022

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