NASA has released a stunning image of a crater on Mars with strange ridges that look like human fingerprints.
The larger Airy crater is 27 miles (43.5 km) wide and the depression in the photo is known as Airy 0. The picture was taken using the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and was shared by NASA on April 11.
In 1884, the larger Airy crater was chosen to mark the line of zero degrees longitude where East and West meet. The boundary between the Eastern and Western hemispheres is marked by the prime meridian, which is located in the U.K. The Airy craters are named after British astronomer Sir George Biddell Airy, who built the telescope that first spotted the massive crater.
The rover snaps a close-up of a mineral flower.
Airy was chosen because it was large enough to be seen by telescopes at the time. According to the post, scientists chose Airy to replace Airy because it was the right size but wouldn't require drastic changes to existing maps.
According to NASA, the Airy crater is located in a region called "Sinus Meridiani", which means "Middle Bay".
The ridges in the crater are known asTARs, and they are a feature we see in craters and other depressions.
Fraeman said that the ridges are formed by sand dunes that are covered by a thin layer of dust. The ground is gray in the photo because of the dust that covers the TARs, which is most likely hematite, a mineral made from iron oxide, which is abundant in the surrounding region. The TARs stand out from the rest of the crater due to the reflective nature of the dust.
This is not the first time strange lines have been seen.
On March 30, the European Space Agency released images of a pair of craters. One of the craters showed evidence of brain terrain, which looked remarkably similar to the ridges on a human brain. Space.com reported that the lines were caused by ice deposits.
In June 2021, a joint mission by the European Space Agency and Russia's space agency captured images of a crater with a tree-like ring. Live Science previously reported that the features were most likely due to ice from the comet.
It was originally published on Live Science.
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