Weird Geological Features Spied on Mars
Observation of the strange features discovered by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconaissance Orbiter (MRO) at the southern edge of Acidalia Planitia on Mars. The main cluster of pits on the left side of the photo are approximately 500 meters long and 100 meters wide.
We may be routinely orbiting, roving, drilling and lasing Mars, searching for elusive traces of life and reconnoitering sites for future human missions, but that doesn't mean studies of the red planet don't throw up surprises. On the contrary.
Take this March 21, 2013 observation by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of the southern edge of Acidalia Planitia, a plain located in the planet's northern hemisphere.
These irregular depressions with weird raised rims aren't impact craters and they can't be wind-blown features as the pits contain boulders that could not have been moved by the Martian winds. HiRISE mission scientists don't believe they could be caused by volcanism either.
http://news.discovery.com/space/mystery-geology-mars-hirise-mro-130507.htm
= new reply since forum marked as read
I believe..
Tikki
Tikki
a pogo stick?
hhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Saying the inane juvenile stuff so others don't have to. 
Seriously, though, it is cool... There's some interesting stuff happening on Mars. I suspect some of it may be subsurface ice that is constantly being sublimated, or else melting briefly into liquid and then quickly boiling/evaporating not long after.
Anyway, that's what Richard C. Hoagland told me. After all, he's an expert on these things. Or so he claims.
Up until now, we've only had one planet to draw conclusions from. So we finally get on a new one and judge things ot be "weird," or "strange"?
Looks to me that our highly tectonic, densely-atmosphered world covered in liquid water is probably the weird one. 
Those natural patterns you see all over the place are known as fractals.
They're math. They are not proof of an electrical anything.
Sprayed my damn coffee...
If you can identify this thing, good for you.
The spiral parts are huge--several hundred yards wide.
(taken by Mars Global Surveyor, around 1999)
But hey, maybe this is a sand dune too...
Nope.
I am talking specifically about the spiral forms that degenerate into "hubcap-shapes on a tube" shape
in the slightly above middle, left side area.
And please don't use the stale old "Ugly hag or pretty maiden" illusion in your response.
Really look.
There may be a geo-based explanation. But I doubt it's sand dunes,
Hit satellite view. Copy and paste this location into the window:
Ad Dahinah, Riyadh Province, Saudi Arabia
Look 2000 meters to the East of that town. I think they call that feature a "wadi," but don't take my word for it.
This particular formation may well be Arthur C. Clarke's "Glass Worm." The Bad Astronomer put most of the controversy about that feature to bed by pointing out that the sensationalists were using the trick of positioning the image in such a way that the brain sees the feature as convex instead of concave.
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/hoagland/glassworm.html
For me, this feature makes more sense to me when I invert it. The original from above:
And the same image rotated 180 degrees:
And here's the feature from Ad Dahinah, with some tricky rotation:
BTW, A wadi is just a valley. Here is the famous Wadi Rum in Jordan:
tire tracks. Where it stops? flat tire.
Be glad when we get to the bottom of the mystery of Mars, or the Martians get sick of us running robots all over the place and attack us and make us a colony.
