On Thursday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shared a recent, incredibly detailed photo of Mars. The beautiful image was taken by the Mars Odyssey orbiter and it shows a sea of blue dunes on the surface of Mars near the planet’s polar areas.
The clear and high-definition picture of the dunes was captured by the Odyssey orbiter using the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) which can view “infrared reflections from the Martian surface”.
Launched in 2001, the Mars Odyssey orbiter is a robotic spacecraft orbiting Mars which is equipped with a thermal imager. Its purpose is to detect evidence of water and ice on the planet.
The American space agency shared this post with the title ‘Blue Dunes on the Red Planet”. Nasa said this image “is part of a special set of images marking the 20th anniversary of Odyssey, the longest-working Mars spacecraft in history”.
The picture shows the planet’s northern polar cap, where temperatures can reach as low as -150C, is covered with blue sand dunes and wind-sculpted lines. The area of these dunes is almost equivalent to the size of Texas, the second-largest US state which covers an area roughly 19 miles wide.
The photo is a false-color image, meaning that the colors are representative of different temperatures. We can see two types of dunes, one is yellowish or orange dunes for warmer climates, and bluish or pale, lagoon-like dunes representing the colder climates.
The image is composed of several images taken from December 2002 to November 2004 by the Thermal Emission Imaging System instrument of the Mars Odyssey orbiter.
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