NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used its Context Camera to capture this image of Bosporos Planum, a location on Mars. The white specks are salt deposits found within a dry channel. The largest impact crater in the scene is nearly 1 mile (1.5 kilometers) across. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Caltech researchers used the 
This animation shows the position of NASA’s Curiosity rover as it journeyed 1,106 feet (337 meters) through an area of Mount Sharp called “the clay-bearing unit” between May 31 and July 20, 2019. Each of these two images were taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The first image shows the rover, which appears as a gray speck, at a location called “Woodland Bay” (top center). The second shows “Sandside Harbour” (bottom center, near the dark sand patch). Look carefully and you can even see the rover’s tracks arcing to the right of the second image. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
Using both cameras to create digital elevation maps, Leask and Ehlmann found that many of the salts were in depressions – once home to shallow ponds – on gently sloping volcanic plains. The scientists also found winding, dry channels nearby – former streams that once fed surface runoff (from the occasional melting of ice or permafrost) into these ponds. Crater counting and evidence of salts on top of volcanic terrain allowed them to date the deposits.
“What is amazing is that after more than a decade of providing high-resolution image, stereo, and infrared data, MRO has driven new discoveries about the nature and timing of these river-connected ancient salt ponds,” said Ehlmann, CRISM’s deputy principal investigator. Her co-author, Leask, is now a post-doctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, which leads CRISM.
The salt minerals were first discovered 14 years ago by NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter, which launched in 2001. MRO, which has higher-resolution instruments than Odyssey, launched in 2005 and has been studying the salts, among many other features of Mars, ever since. Both are managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
“Part of the value of MRO is that our view of the planet keeps getting more detailed over time,” said Leslie Tamppari, the mission’s deputy project scientist at (function(d, s, id){
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