All eyes are on Jupiter as Juno dove into the gas giant’s orbit yesterday, but last week scientists announced an intriguing finding from Mars – close-up observations from NASA’s Curiosity rover revealed details of unique kinds of wind-sculpted sand ripples.
These mid-sized ripples are unlike those found here in Earth’s deserts, which can be classified as either small ripples (decimeter-scale) or large dunes (hundred-meter-scale). “On Mars, we found that there is an additional type of bedform of an intermediate scale,” the science team collaborator for the Curiosity mission, Matheiu Laporte, told Digital Trends. “These large Martian wind ripples have crest-to-crest spacings ranging between one and five meters, and they do not look like bedforms one would find in sand in Earth’s deserts.” Laporte and his team published there findings on Friday in the journal Science.
