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Mars is home to a dusty landscape painted in orange and brown hues, surrounded by craters and adorned with a variety of hills and mountains. Depending on where you look, Mars is also home to many steep cliffs that look like long streaks when they are captured remotely and at almost vertical rock faces when broken by the Martian rover. . One of the last images of these cliffs includes a clearly visible avalanche.
Unlike the avalanches of white and shiny snow that we know on Earth, the avalanche captured on Mars is dark brown, reflecting the dusty landscape of the red planet. The image was taken by the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft HiRISE camera on May 29, but was only recently released by the space agency.
The dusty explosion shown in the picture above is the result of ice and rocks that run down a cliff of more than 1,600 feet, according to NASA. The space agency explains that each spring of this part of Mars, a stack of rocks is bathed in sun, which warms the ice sufficiently to destabilize it, causing avalanches.
Large ice blocks are described as raising dust, producing the great explosion revealed by the image. This is not the first time that NASA has captured an avalanche on the red planet, although they are not all as clear and dusty as the May event.
In October 2015, for example, NASA shared the image of an avalanche in the middle of a large rocky cliff. Unlike the one above, this avalanche (below) is snow-white and resembles the one we know on Earth.
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