Public domain
Changes of a Happy Crater
From the collection of NASA Image and Video Library. Free to download, adapt and use — no permission needed.
About this work
We've monitored the so-called Happy Face Crater in the south polar region of Mars for almost a decade. Two images that we took, one in 2011 and the other in 2020, at roughly the same season, show color variations that are due to different amounts of bright frost over darker red ground. The "blobby" features in the polar cap are due to the sun sublimating away the carbon dioxide into these round patterns.
NASA Image and Video Library’s own descriptionCredit lineChanges of a Happy Crater. NASA/JPL, 2021-01-29. Public domain. ID: PIA24389.
