Kaiser Crater Dunes

Scaled Image

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/ASU

About this image

This VIS image shows part of the floor of Kaiser Crater. Kaiser Crater is 207 km (129 miles) in diameter and is located in Noachis Terra west of Hellas Planitia. This sand dune field is one of several regions of sand dunes located on the southern part of the crater floor. The image also shows the complex crater floor beneath the dunes. These dunes are composed of basaltic sand that has collected in the bottom of the crater. The topographic depression of the crater forms a sand trap that prevents the sand from escaping. Dune fields are common in the bottoms of craters on Mars and appear as dark splotches that often lean up against the downwind walls of the craters. Dunes are useful for studying both the geology and meteorology of Mars. The sand forms by erosion of larger rocks, but it is unclear when and where this erosion took place on Mars or how such large volumes of sand could be formed. The dunes also indicate the local wind directions by their morphology. In this case, there are few clear slipfaces that would indicate the downwind direction. The crests of the dunes also typically run north-south in the image. This dune form indicates that there are probably two prevailing wind directions that run east and west (left to right and right to left). The smallest dunes (lower left side of image) have slipfaces to the left, indicating for these dunes the general wind direction is from right to left (from east to west).

Please see the THEMIS Data Citation Note for details on crediting THEMIS images. 

Context

Image ID: 
V91155007 (View data in Mars Image Explorer)
-46.9828
19.3481
91155
2022-07-02 23:58
Thu, 2022-09-22
VIS
512 pixels (17 km)
1824 pixels (61 km)
0.033923 km/pixel
0.0342908 km/pixel

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