HiRISE Views

These are crops from a HiRISE image of the central part of Phoenix's planned landing site... I must admit I'm very nervous about Phoenix coming down amongst these rocks. Each one is quite a bit bigger than the lander itself...! :-(

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Two cropped areas from the same image today...

(Full size here)

(Full size here)

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I cropped these close-ups of interesting features from images in the "Imagefest 5" release on the HiRISE website...

A spray of rocks on a valley floor (full size here)

Large "monolith" boulder casting a long shadow... (full size here)

Track left by a large boulder rolling and bouncing down a slope... (full size here)

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Full size version here

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Today NASA released stunning images of Mars's largest moon, Phobos, as seen by HiRISE...

here are some crops I've taken from my colour-enhanced version of the main image...

You can find the full size HiRISE image here...

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Yes, the HiRISE IAS Viewer continues to amaze and amuse me, and I keep finding real gold nuggets in the HiRISE archives. Here are a few I found today...

My first thought when I saw that was "Hmmm, great landslide, but nothing special..." But then I zoomed in and saw this...

... which made me sit up and take notice because the presence of such heavy cratering on that landslide apron means the landslide happened a long, long time ago. Most landslides we see happened relatively recently, so this was a striking illustration of just how ancient the martian landscape is.

Then I found this intriguing area...you'll see there are two prominent craters...

... which again look nothing special, but when you zoom in on them you can see that they have layered mounds inside them, at the top, that look strikingly similar...

Full size version of that lower crater here...

And finally, when I saw this image I couldn't help wondering what kind of a view a rover - or future martian settler or colonist - would have if they stood on the edge of the cliffs and looked down into this dust dune rippled valley... I can almost hear the sweeping, epic theme from "The Big Country" when I look at this scene...

 

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Full size version of crater here.

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My first independent look at "The Avalanche" with IAS Viewer...

Full size version here...

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Full size here.

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Full size version here.

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