it's been a while since i felt like working with orbital imaging from mars but i saw esa posted some new data from the mars express probe for the first time in a while. sometimes it's nice to just browse through what scientsts have been interested in taking pictures of, and every now and then you see one that the Art Eye twigs on. this is one of them.
this scene captures an area near mars' south pole called ultima lingula. it is a buried "tongue" of the polar ice cap, and is at least 2 km of dust and ice rich layers. around the edges of this ice sheet, erosion and sublimation have cut back into the ice cap, revealing the layers inside of it. this image was taken about a month before the southern hemisphere's southern solstice, a time at which the extensive carbon dioxide frost layers that form during the cold winter are rapidly being released back to the atmosphere. these form cold winds that descend off the ice sheet and kick up dust. these winds are what have formed the dust clouds at the center of the image. what's really cool is that these winds are blowing across a valley before hitting a kilometer-high ridge that runs roughly top to bottom in the left third of the image. because the cold air is so dense, very little of the dust is making it up and over the rim of the valley and is instead circulating around the valley towards the bottom of the picture.
just a really cool image from a camera that's been at mars for nearly 20 years (a milestone it reaches on christmas this year) and running on hardware that is now nearly 30 years old
image credit: esa/dlr/fu berlin/aster cowart, cc by-sa 3.0 igo