NASA surprised this week by spreading some strange images showing holes on the surface of the planet Mars. American astronomers hastened to clarify that it was dunesbut even so it is not usual for them to be such well-defined circles.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) mission has captured this image formed by sand dunes almost perfectly circular and aligned. While sand dunes on the red planet are common and come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, such well-defined circles have not been seen before.
The slight asymmetry in the sand dunes shows that their steep sides are oriented to the south. The University of Arizona, which operates the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRise) camera used aboard MRO to take the image, said in a statement that this indicates the sands are moving south, although Martian winds may be variable.
Although this situation that shows the movement of the sands may seem strange, the experts They rule out any type of influence of an extraterrestrial life And they blame it on the winds.
The images of the planetary surface have been extracted as a result of a monitoring to observe how the Frost at the end of winter. However, the main mission of the MRO was to search for traces of water on Mars. Although this mission ended 12 years ago, on December 21, 2010, the spacecraft still serves as the communications bridge back to Earth for other missions to Mars and continues to transmit amazing images captured by HiRise.
This is just one of the 60 seats on Mars monitored by this camera, present on the red planet since the MRO arrived at Mars in 2006 and began making the first dedicated survey of the planet’s sand dunes.