A spacecraft and a camera built in Colorado have captured a stunning image of avalanches on the north pole of Mars.
The image shows “tan clouds billowing away from the foot of a towering slope, where ice and dust have just cascaded down,” according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.
The photograph was taken Feb. 19 by the High Resolution Imaging Experiment camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder built the camera, while Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Jefferson County built the spacecraft. The spacecraft is flown and operated from Lockheed Martin’s Waterton facility in Jefferson County.
“When you look at these still photos, it’s a very quiet, inactive planet to date, from what we can see,” said Wayne Sidney, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft-operations lead at Lockheed Martin. “A picture like this shows there are dynamics going on on the planet. . . . It’s not such a dead world.”
Kelly Yamanouchi, The Denver Post
