We’ve imaged thousands of new impact sites. These are locations with before and after images constraining when the impact happened. We are especially interested in craters that expose shallow ice, which appears as especially bright and relatively blue material.

The new impact imaged here looks like such a crater, but it formed at 3.5 North latitude, almost exactly on the equator, where shallow ice is highly unstable to loss by sublimation. There is also regolith that is bright and relatively blue, perhaps material altered by hot springs or fumaroles. This crater may have revealed an interesting deposit that was hidden by dust. We will monitor this crater over time to see if it fades rapidly as expected for ice.

ID: ESP_092110_1835
date: 21 March 2026
altitude: 267 km

https://uahirise.org/hipod/ESP_092110_1835
NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
#Mars #science #NASA