Photo: NASA/JPL/UArizona
If you are a bread lover (yes, there are such people out there), then the term “boule” might mean something. It’s the traditional shape the French are giving to some of the bread they make, a sort of squashed ball that may or may not be decorated with intricate patterns carved directly into the dough before it goes into the oven.
Boule can thus be found on most French tables, but elsewhere as well, adapted to suit the local traditions. One however cannot expect to see a boule on the surface of Mars, inside some of the many impact craters that dot the surface of the planet.
Yet it kind of seems that’s exactly what we have here, in an area just 1 km (0.62 miles) across, as seen from an altitude of 292 km (181 miles). It’s from that distance that the HiRISE camera snapped this incredible instance of a crater in an undisclosed region of the alien piece of rock, somewhere in the northern middle latitudes.
What we’re looking at is, as explained by NASA and the University of Arizona, who run HiRISE, is an impact crater filled with wind-blown ripples. As with many other instances of the Red Planet, this one is not fully explained by experts either, with details being provided at an observational level only.
“Outside of the craters and along the crater floors, the ripples are all oriented in the same direction,” they say.
“However, along the walls of some of the larger craters, the ripples are situated radially away from the center, indicating the winds moving inside the larger craters can be influenced by the topography of the crater wall.”
The alien bread, if we can call it that, is relatively fresh to human eyes, having been captured in this photo in July 2021 and just released by NASA.
Yet it kind of seems that’s exactly what we have here, in an area just 1 km (0.62 miles) across, as seen from an altitude of 292 km (181 miles). It’s from that distance that the HiRISE camera snapped this incredible instance of a crater in an undisclosed region of the alien piece of rock, somewhere in the northern middle latitudes.
What we’re looking at is, as explained by NASA and the University of Arizona, who run HiRISE, is an impact crater filled with wind-blown ripples. As with many other instances of the Red Planet, this one is not fully explained by experts either, with details being provided at an observational level only.
“Outside of the craters and along the crater floors, the ripples are all oriented in the same direction,” they say.
“However, along the walls of some of the larger craters, the ripples are situated radially away from the center, indicating the winds moving inside the larger craters can be influenced by the topography of the crater wall.”
The alien bread, if we can call it that, is relatively fresh to human eyes, having been captured in this photo in July 2021 and just released by NASA.
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