Woah, no need to reach for the benzoyl peroxide or pimple patches! These reddish and white patches are actually depressions (not hills), still covered in seasonal carbon dioxide ice on Mars’ South Polar layered deposits.

This crater cluster is unusual because most craters near the South Pole are single ones. Crater clusters likely form when the incoming space rock breaks up in Mars’ atmosphere, though recent work suggests that this impactor breakup is not latitude or elevation dependent. Rather than properties of Mars’ atmosphere causing the break up, the impactors themselves might already be weakened to be consistent with the observations. This new work also finds that over half of new small impacts detected by HiRISE are clusters.

While we don’t know when these specific craters formed, their small size and clustered appearance are consistent with these dated crater results, suggesting their most out of this world feature is their dry-ice covered appearance.

ID: ESP_075356_0970
date: 24 August 2022
altitude: 245 km

https://uahirise.org/hipod/ESP_075356_0970
NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
#Mars #science #NASA