NASA orbiter detects shifting sand dunes on Mars

Nature : New data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show that the sand dunes on Mars are moving. Because Mars’s atmosphere is so much thinner and its high-speed winds are less frequent and weaker than Earth’s, it was thought that Mars’s large dune fields were formed millions of years ago when Mars had a thicker atmosphere. But in a paper published online yesterday in Nature, Nathan Bridges at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and colleagues present evidence of unexpectedly high sand migration in a Martian dune field called Nili Patera. Better understanding of Mars’s surface dynamics will help in planning future robotic and human Mars exploration missions.