Tanya Harrison
Dust Storm Over Buvinda Vallis, Mars
My job is to take pictures of Mars. How cool is that? :) I am a member of the science operations team for the Context Camera (CTX) aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which just celebrated its 5th anniversary at Mars on 10 March.
This pair of CTX images shows an area of Mars called Buvinda Vallis, a valley adjacent to the volcano Hecates Tholus at ~32°N, 207°W. In an attempt to get stereo (3D) coverage of the area, we shot the valley in February 2009. When we came back less than a month later to acquire the second image in the stereopair, a local dust storm obscured part of the image. Atmospheric dust tends to make CTX images look pretty bad (noisy). However, in this case, what we captured were some spectacular dust clouds in the southern portion of the image. The small white speck to the east of the crater near the center of the image is a dust devil.
Each image is 30 km wide. North is slightly to the upper right and illumination is from the left. Taken during autumn in the martian northern hemisphere.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems, post-processing by Tanya Harrison.
Dust Storm Over Buvinda Vallis, Mars
My job is to take pictures of Mars. How cool is that? :) I am a member of the science operations team for the Context Camera (CTX) aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which just celebrated its 5th anniversary at Mars on 10 March.
This pair of CTX images shows an area of Mars called Buvinda Vallis, a valley adjacent to the volcano Hecates Tholus at ~32°N, 207°W. In an attempt to get stereo (3D) coverage of the area, we shot the valley in February 2009. When we came back less than a month later to acquire the second image in the stereopair, a local dust storm obscured part of the image. Atmospheric dust tends to make CTX images look pretty bad (noisy). However, in this case, what we captured were some spectacular dust clouds in the southern portion of the image. The small white speck to the east of the crater near the center of the image is a dust devil.
Each image is 30 km wide. North is slightly to the upper right and illumination is from the left. Taken during autumn in the martian northern hemisphere.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems, post-processing by Tanya Harrison.