Incredible video takes flight through the dunes of Mars

Mars may be a cold, dry, dead world, but it’s still a part of nature. As a part of nature, it displays a kind of haunted beauty as only non-living forces shape its surface over long periods of time. It is like a laboratory on a rocky planet shaped by natural forces where the interference of living processes is absent.

A new NASA video highlights the haunted allure of Matara Crater, a rather insignificant crater among more than 43,000 craters on the surface of Mars that are more than 5 km in diameter. The video comes from the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The still images that make up the video were taken from 251 km (156 miles) above the surface.

Matara crater is only 48 kilometers (30 miles) in diameter. But it is intriguing for its dunes and undulating, textured nature. It is named after a city in Sri Lanka.

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“Matara Crater is one of our favorites for imaging due to the huge and gorgeous sheet of sand that dominates the floor. We often picture these dunes for the gorges that form on them, some from carbon dioxide ice,” NASA wrote in the text accompanying the video.

The floor of the Matara crater is dominated by a huge layer of sand. The relentless wind from Mars carves the top of the sheet into dunes, and the HiRISE camera has cataloged these changing shapes over time. There are more than 100 images of the dunes on the HiRISE website.

The dunes of Matara crater change with the passing of the seasons. Carbon dioxide freezes and melts and contributes to changes in the dunes. The folks over at HiRISE highlighted these changes in a separate video a couple of years ago.

NASA didn’t build the HiRISE instrument and launched it into Mars orbit on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter just for nice dune photos. Dunes can reveal a lot about the planet’s past. Different sizes of dust grains tell scientists about the atmospheric conditions that deposited them. The dunes also contain information about the forces at work since their deposition. Taken together with other scientific observations of Mars, they help paint a picture of the planet’s history.

Some dunes even help us understand one of the biggest problems on Mars: what happened to its water. China’s Zhurong rover has found evidence in sand dunes near Mars’ equator, showing that liquid water flowed there as recently as 400,000 years ago.

Sand dunes are intriguing targets for rover exploration, but they are difficult to navigate and dangerous to wheeled vehicles. NASA’s Spirit rover got stuck in the sand in 2010 and its mission ended. Scientists are busy working on other methods of locomotion to allow rovers to traverse sand dunes without wheels. Instead, these rovers would have bodies rolling across the sand. One design is based on the Golden Wheel Spider from the Namib Desert. It is known for its wind-assisted rolling abilities that help it transition through dunes more easily. Use its rolling action to avoid parasitic wasps.

FESTO has developed a prototype of a rotating robot based on the Cartwheeling Spider. On flat ground, the robot moves twice as fast when in rotation mode. It’s called the BionicWheelBot.

Here is the BionicWheelBot tested in the Sahara desert.

Rolling robots may never visit Matara Crater to explore its dunes. But at least we have the MRO and the HiRISE camera. Thanks to them and the 4K video quality, we can dream of visiting it ourselves.