Science News Desk – NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft has captured an unusual circle of sand dunes on the Red Planet. The dunes were photographed by MRO’s High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) color camera. While sand dunes of many sizes are common on Mars. MRO ‘captured dunes that are almost perfectly circular, which is unusual’, planetary geologist Alfred McEwen wrote for the Highrise picture-of-the-day feature.
McEwen wrote that despite being circular, they are still ‘slightly asymmetrical’ and have a ‘steep slippery face at the south end’. He explained that this indicates that ‘the sand generally blows south, but winds can be variable.’ The dune broke off in late November last year – when researchers were studying the area to monitor seasonal changes in frost coverage. This image shows that Frost is absent from that entire scene.
MRO, which has higher-resolution instruments than Odyssey, was launched in 2005. It has studied the Red Planet’s atmosphere and terrain from orbit since 2006 and also serves as a major data relay station for other Mars missions. Equipped with a powerful camera called HiRISE, which has aided in many discoveries, MRO has sent back thousands of stunning images of the surface of Mars that are helping scientists learn more about Mars, including features on the planet’s surface or It also includes the history of the flow of water near it.