I used to have reoccurring nightmares about falling into a pit. A new image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft (aka the MRO) pushes all my childhood scary-dream buttons.
The image, acquired Jan. 24 by the MRO’s HiRise camera, shows a startling black pit against a lighter expanse of surface. These leads to a big question: What’s hiding down there in the dark depths?
The HiRise team at the University of Arizona performed a brightness enhancement to see into the abyss.
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“The floor of the pit appears to be smooth sand and slopes down to the southeast,” HiRise co-investigator Ross Beyer wrote in a Friday statement. “The hope was to determine if this was an isolated pit, or if it was a skylight into a tunnel, much like skylights in the lava tubes of Hawai’i.”
Read more: cnet
