A giant fingerprint on Mars: High res camera reveals details just 3ft across on Red Planet




This striking range of dunes and craters appears to form a giant cosmic fingerprint on the surface of the Red Planet.



Scientists believe the undulating ground reveals global climate changes that took place on Mars over the past few million years.



The area is in the Coprates region, a large trough that forms part of the Valles Marineris - a system of canyons stretching thousands of miles along Mars' equator.

The whitish areas could be evaporites - mineral sediments left behind when salt water evaporates. Such deposits would be of great interest as they indicate potential habitats for past martian life.



Planet print: This picture was taken in a crater near Fan in the Coprates Region of Mars. The giant fingerprint-like shape was created by possible evaporites - sediments formed by the evaporation of water

Good gully: A close up shot of gullies at the edge of the Hale Crater on the Red Planet. It covers an area 0.6miles across

The detailed image is just one of thousands of pictures recently unveiled taken by Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The images were collected using a High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera during more than 1,500 telescopic observations.

Each full image from HiRISE, taken between April and August last year, covers a strip of Martian ground six kilometers (3.7 miles) wide, showing details as small as one metre, or yard, across. They are the most detailed pictures of the Red Planet's surface taken from space.



The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been studying Mars with an advanced set of instruments since 2006. It has returned more data about the planet than all other past and current missions to Mars combined.

In another dramatic red image several gullies can be seen carved into hill-slopes and the walls of impact craters. You can see wide V-shaped channels running downhill (from top to bottom) where the material that carved the gully flowed. At the bottom of the channel this material empties out onto a fan-shaped mound.

On Earth these features usually form through the movement of liquid water, long thought to be absent on Mars. Planetary scientists are examining the gullies to see if they change and work out whether they form under today's cold dry conditions.

Mars is also subject to huge tectonic forces. One image, that shows a dark crocodile shaped patch on the surface, is from a deep trough known as the Ulysses Fossae. These types of troughs form when the crust is stretched until it breaks, often due to the large weight of nearby volcanos. It lies in the Tharsis quadrangle, which also has some of Mars' greatest volcanoes including Olympus Mons. At 16.7miles high Olympus is three times the height of Mount Everest.

The orbiter is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment is operated by the University of Arizona, Tucson.



They will be used to investigate the safety of potential future landing sights for the Mars Science Laboratory, which is due to launch from Earth in 2011. The rover will assess whether Mars was, or is still today, an environment able to support microbial life. It will carry the biggest, most advanced suite of instruments for scientific studies ever sent to the martian surface.

This image shows Ulysses Fossae - a trough in the Tharsis quadrangle of Mars. The area includes huge volcanoes including the Red Planet's biggest called Olympus Mons A river ran through it? A filled channel west of Ladon Valles on Mars (left) and the valley networks and layered beds in the Melas Chasma (right) near the Equator suggests water once flowed on Mars



Snow shapes: This sawtooth pattern was created by carbon dioxide in the southern polar region of Mars







