Public domain
A Recipe for Martian Scallops
From the collection of NASA Image and Video Library. Free to download, adapt and use — no permission needed.
About this work
About a third of Mars has water ice just below the dusty surface. Figuring out exactly where is vital for future human explorers. One of the ways scientists do this is to look for landforms that only occur when this buried ice is present. These scallops are one of those diagnostic landforms. A layer of clean ice lies just below the surface in this image. As the ice ablates away in some spots the surface dust collapses into the hole that's left.
NASA Image and Video Library’s own descriptionCredit lineA Recipe for Martian Scallops. NASA/JPL, 2021-03-22. Public domain. ID: PIA24468.
