Red-Toned Materials East of Terby Crater
HiRISE PICTURE OF THE DAY: 2 DECEMBER 2025

Red Tones, Red Planet

The CaSSIS instrument on the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter identified here extremely red crater rim materials. This appears very bright and distinct in THEMIS (Mars Odyssey) nighttime data as well. Our image demonstrates how different teams can complement one another to analyze the same region to learn more details. This footprint is located east of Terby Crater, the site of an ancient lakebed with clay deposits.



HiRISE Image of Exocomet 3I/ATLAS
On 2 October 2025, MRO turned away from Mars to image 3I/ATLAS, only the third interstellar object ever observed passing through our solar system!

HiRISE Instrument News
Since July 23, 2023, HiRISE observations have lacked data from the RED4 CCD due to a hardware issue, creating a gap in the middle of image products and reducing the color swath to 1 CCD width. We are investigating the hardware issue and may be able to acquire some RED4 data in the future.

Circular Sand Dunes
Sand dunes of many shapes and sizes are common on Mars. In this example the dunes are almost perfectly circular, which is unusual.