New Mars Mystery Feature ~ what is this thing???

Greetings everybody! Pretty sure this feature is new to the community....
Need to scroll images to the side to see the feature~



Above is just a context image of the dunefield. The feature is located near the edge in the center.





Help me out! What is this???

I suspect one of those pointy 50s-60s era spaceships from Earth … but hard to say for sure since such a cool & classic design is probably universal. Surely it's not native to Mars (only libertarians and ATS nutcases think the civilization there actually has technology ... psawww whatEVER). Anyhow, the rivulets obviously come from ice that melted when the rocket descended…

Okay, had to edit this ~ just joking about the spaceship ~ scroll images to the side to see feature ...

Okay seriously, any ideas? I think this feature (located in the northern polar erg) is fascinating for its clean symmetry and its 'convenient' position right in the center of an inter-dune floor. I found nothing even remotely similar elsewhere in the dune field.

This object (or ... artifact? eh??) is around 7 m tall (~15 m from object center to tip of shadow) and ~12 m across at its base (measured perpendicular to shadow direction). HiRISE can re-acquire this scene at 25 cm/pixel, which would give 4x the pixel coverage -- I'm about to submit the coordinates to the 'HiWish' public suggestion page.

Thanks for lookin ~ Cheers!

HiRISE: ESP_019124_2575
Solar incidence angle = 64
Emission angle = 0.2 (essentially straight downward)
Spacecraft altitude = 198.6 miles
Map-projected scale = 50 cm/pixel
Image center: 77.530 N; 307.859 E
Solar longitude = 138.3 (Northern mid-summer)

Interesting. Way too big to be a spacecraft (a very unlikely hypothesis), and we can't tell how tall it is. It's more solid than the terrain around it, otherwise it would have eroded the same way and blended in.

Was this actually an image taken of Mars?

This is most likely a sinkhole or a crater. If you notice the dried up rivulets leading down toward that dip in the sand dune, it is most likely that water or wind erosion has caused this indentation. This is nothing spectacular as there was another ATS thread on a clear and obvious sinkhole:

Giant hole and Tunel found in Mars

...........pyramid ?
2nd

Originally posted by XeroOne
Interesting. Way too big to be a spacecraft (a very unlikely hypothesis), and we can't tell how tall it is. It's more solid than the terrain around it, otherwise it would have eroded the same way and blended in.

Was this actually an image taken of Mars?

Hey XeroOne, really? Only 7 meters tall isn't that much ~ we can tell it's height by knowing the length of shadow and the angle of the sun ... Also, it's not eroded terrain, it's in a dune field that's among the youngest and freshest features on Mars (too young to have impact craters, but actual age is unknown) -- I should've mentioned that in the post ...

Definitely on Mars -- info on bottom, public-release image ...

It looks like a cliff

It's hard to fathom why a ship of any nature would be then and there to be photographed presumably from an orbiter, what would it's purpose be?

Originally posted by Kratos40
This is most likely a sinkhole or a crater. If you notice the dried up rivulets leading down toward that dip in the sand dune, it is most likely that water or wind erosion has caused this indentation. This is nothing spectacular as there was another ATS thread on a clear and obvious sinkhole:

Giant hole and Tunel found in Mars

No, this is completely different. This is an object casting a shadow.

Originally posted by yourmaker
It looks like a cliff

It's hard to fathom why a ship of any nature would be then and there to be photographed presumably from an orbiter, what would it's purpose be?

edit on 8-8-2012 by yourmaker because: (no reason given)

Yeah the spaceship part was just a joke~~~

Clearly, It is a Pyramid.
Good catch.
S&F.