NASA probe spies dusty trees on Martian surface

by Stevie Smith - Jan 14 2010, 10:22

At first glance, this impressive new photo of the area directly around the Martian North Pole suggests the red planet is home to some fairly dense patches of trees and foliage. However, what the photo actually shows are plumes of naturally occurring gas erupting from the ground.

Described by NASA as something of an uncanny optical illusion, the high-resolution photo, which was taken by the U.S. space administration’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), shows dark balsaltic sand being pushed out from the planet’s surface as the sun vaporises pockets of frozen carbon dioxide (or dry ice).

Speaking with The Sun newspaper, Candy Hansen, a member of the MRO team at the University of Arizona, explained that the black patches “are sand, dislodged as ice evaporates, which slide down the dunes… At this time of the Martian year the whole scene is covered by CO2 frost.”

The photograph, which is one of a series appearing in this month’s edition of the journal Icarus, was snapped by the MRO’s HiRISE camera, which is the most powerful piece of optical recording equipment ever dispatched into space for the purpose of capturing detailed images of another planet.

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