A colorful new crater near Mars' equator

A small and colorful new crater near the Martian equator takes center stage in this picture shared by the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) team. The image was captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter when it was flying at an altitude of 261 km and the crater was initially detected by the Context Camera onboard the spacecraft.

"The distinctive color of all of the ejecta shows that the surface material is different from the subsurface. Craters like this can provide useful probes of the composition of buried materials, which can be different from the surface because of weathering or processes that preferentially add or remove materials with different composition or grain size," the HiRISE team wrote in a post earlier this week.

HiPOD: A Colorful New CraterThis image shows a small, colorful new crater near the equator of Mars, first detected by the Context Camera. The distinctive color of all of the ejecta shows that the surface material is different from the subsurface.https://t.co/uFIlrykyYN#Mars pic.twitter.com/42SVRRkXtA

— HiRISE: Beautiful Mars (NASA) (@HiRISE) November 2, 2023

Context Camera or CTX makes observations simultaneously with high-resolution images collected by HiRISE and data collected by the mineral-finding CRISM (Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars) instrument onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Together, the trio makes an extremely powerful toolset.

According to the mission website, scientists examine details of rocks and mineral fields using other instruments, while CTX provides a bigger-picture view of the terrain. CTX takes images of the Martian features from 400 kilometers (250 miles) above the planet. It has a resolution of 6 meters per pixel over a swath 30 kilometers wide (almost 19 miles) and is used to monitor changes occurring on the planet.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launched in 2005 to hunt for evidence that water persisted on the Martian surface for a long period of time in the past.