Do you know what this is? Well at first it may not look incredibly interesting, but there is something fascinating happening here. This is a “hole.” Not just any hole but a hole on Mars. What is really interesting is this is a hole found in the Southern hemisphere on Mars, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took the photo. What I love is scientists have no idea what created the hole. One theory is a meteorite impact. However, if so we know most meteorite impacts on Earth, Moon, and beyond have pointy rims like you would see on a coffee cup or the ice cream containers that you would buy from the grocery store. Instead, we see a smooth rim pointing downwards. Okay, so maybe it’s a pit that sunk in? If so, how did that happen? Mars should have a few more of these at least, right? Well, we don’t see a ton of these, in fact, this is the only one we see so far. Now,...

Mars is a hot topic these days with the discovery of water, the revelation of what happened to the water on Mars billions of years ago, to this…mysterious sand dune. Yes, what they call the Namib dune. Mars has a lot of strange landscape features and this sand dune is no exception. The dune is about 4 meters tall and what separates this dune from the rest is the fact that it moves 1 meter per year. Mars rover Curiosity took a side quest to actually study this up close. It’ll help scientists understand how Martian dunes act and behave. There isn’t a ton of information on this dune as this photo was taken in November of 2015. It still counts as a first for humans studying an active sand dune other than Earth.   For more information or to download the full image in color you can check out JPL’s webpage here.