Pic of the Week:  Gypsum Dunes on Mars

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Gypsum dunes on Mars. (NASA, Univ. of Arizona’s Lunar & Planetary Laboratory)

This week’s amazing image was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launched in 2005. The University of Arizona’s Lunar & Planetary Laboratory, which operates HiRISE, described the image in this way:

This image suggestion outlines a contact between gypsum-rich dunes in Olympia Undae and flat-lying layers of the basal (or bottom) unit. Our goal is to look for a stratigraphic and compositional comparison between the dunes and the basal unit.

Olympia Undae, the largest continuous dune field on Mars,  is in the northern polar region of Mars.