HiRISE Views

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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