Blast Waves and Dusty Landslides

Meteorites hit Mars and create small craters like the one we've imaged here. Usually we spot these new craters in lower-resolution images from the Context Camera because the impact disturbs dust on the surface and creates a dark mark that's much bigger than the crater.

This meteorite hit a dusty area and made a crater, but did something a little more special to the surrounding dust. We can see dozens of dark, dust-free, streaks on slopes surrounding the crater. These slope streaks form when dust slumps downhill and happen naturally on a regular basis.

In this case though, the impact and explosion that made the crater seems to have set off many of these downhill slumps of dust simultaneously. This could have happened from the explosion's blast wave passing through the air or the shaking of the ground that it caused.

The map is projected here at a scale of 25 centimeters (9.8 inches) per pixel. (The original image scale is 31.2 centimeters [12.3 inches] per pixel [with 1 x 1 binning]; objects on the order of 93 centimeters [36.6 inches] across are resolved.) North is up.

This is a stereo pair with ESP_065360_1900.

The University of Arizona, in Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colorado. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.