Mars: Dry Ice and Dunes

Mars's seasonal polar caps are composed primarily of carbon-dioxide frost.

Hitting a moving target over 306 million miles away is no easy feat. Learn how JPL navigation engineers have guided the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter toward its mission-critical capture into orbit ar...

Getting a spacecraft to Mars is no walk in the park - as launch engineers are well aware. But when the spacecraft in question is among the largest ever sent to the red planet, there are specific ch...

Download a PDF of the Mars as Art Booklet.

This image, taken with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, shows a mesa within the "Murray Buttes" area on Mars showing a complex fracture pattern (black arrow) protrudi...

Nili Patera is a region on Mars in which dunes and ripples are moving rapidly. HiRISE continues to monitor this area every couple of months to see changes over seasonal and annual time scales.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is Off to Mars!

This graphic presents Martian atmospheric temperature data as curtains over an image of Mars taken during a regional dust storm. The temperature profiles extend from the surface to about 50 miles u...

Download a PDF of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Launch Press Kit.

This map shows the route driven by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity through the 43rd Martian day, or sol, of the rover's mission on Mars (Sept. 19, 2012).

A Martian dust devil roughly 12 miles (20 kilometers) high was captured winding its way along the Amazonis Planitia region of Northern Mars on March 14, 2012 by the High Resolution Imaging Science ...

This image is of a portion of the Southern plains region within Hellas, the largest impact basin on Mars, with a diameter of about 2300 kilometers (1400 miles).

This is an image of Gusev Crater taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE camera and is one of the potential landing sites for the Mars 2020 rover.

These two Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) images were acquired over the northern plains of Mars near one of the possible landing sites for NASA's Phoenix mission, set t...

This pair of images covers one of many sites on Mars where researchers use the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to study changes in gullies on slopes. Changes such as the ones v...

This impact crater has gullies incised into its walls on the north and eastern sides. A couple of gullies on the north wall are unusual because a segment in the middle becomes wider than the upslop...

These images from the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show several impact scars on Mars made by pieces of the NASA Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft that the spacecraft shed just before entering ...

Martian gullies as seen from HiRISE on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter resemble gullies on Earth that are carved by liquid water. However, when they are observed with the addition of mineralogic...

Seasons change even on Mars and NASA's fleet of explorers are helping scientists learn more about the effects on the Red Planet.

This movie clip shows a global map of Mars with atmospheric changes from Feb. 18, 2017, through March 6, 2017, a period when two regional-scale dust storms appeared. It combines hundreds of images ...

The bright feature in this image might be the parachute from a 1971 Soviet Mars lander named Mars 3. The image was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's...

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover used its Navigation Camera (Navcam) on April 11, 2014, to record this scene of a butte called "Mount Remarkable" and surrounding outcrops at a waypoint called "the Kimbe...

This picture of a heart-shaped feature in Arabia Terra on Mars was taken on May 23, 2010, by the Context Camera (CTX) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took this photo of the Curiosity rover in September 2015, as Curiosity was exploring the boundary between two rock units: the light-toned Murray Formation and the ov...

This map shows where NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has driven since landing at a site subsequently named "Bradbury Landing," and traveling to an overlook position near beside "Point Lake," in drives ...