NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has taken photos of the gorgeous black sand dunes on the Martian surface. The newly released images show a part of the Bagnold Dunes. It is a big black sand field that is located on Mount Sharp’s northwestern flank.
Incidentally, the rover studied four different sites in the Bagnold region from early February to early April this year. In 2015, the six-wheeled robot had arrived at a different area of Bagnold. Soon after, the rover began to study some crescent-shaped dunes, beginning the first close-up investigation of active extraterrestrial sand dunes. According to Space.com, researchers should be better able to understand how Martian winds sculpt dunes into different patterns and shapes with the help of Curiosity's recent work at the linear-dune site.
"At these linear dunes, the wind regime is more complicated than at the crescent dunes we studied earlier," California Institute of Technology’s Mathieu Lapotre said in a statement. "There seems to be more contribution from the wind coming down the mountain’s slope here compared with the crescent dunes farther north."
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