A great trail of 'blue' was found on the red planet

(CNN) – Mars is often nicknamed the Red Planet, but footage from one of NASA's orbiters showed what appeared to be a striking blue sand dune.

The images were captured by Mars Renaissance Orbiter, using the HiRISE camera, described on his website as "the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet".

But the dune is not really blue, she is gray. After a long process of editing, colors and lines stand out.

Orbits, unlike rovers, do not touch the ground, but rather monitor the planet just outside its atmosphere.

Without the camera, the human eye would see a gray slate and not much else. The camera captures many more details, but even this camera can not see everything because of all the dust on the planet.

Thus, three separate images are taken from the region and the colors are individually adjusted to red, blue and green using infrared technology, said Alfred McEwen, director of the Planetary Image Research Laboratory at the University of New York. Arizona.

After starting the contrast, the dune appears in turquoise blue because it "is made of a finer material and / or has a different composition of the environment," according to a recent press release from NASA.

"Then we combine the colors because the images have a very low contrast," McEwen told CNN.

The dune was found on the crater of Lyot, where most other dunes are barchan, or crescent-shaped. They take this form because of their position in the wind. We do not know why the "blue" dune is more abstract.

The-CNN-Wire
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