HiWish program
HiWish is a program created by NASA so that anyone can suggest a place for the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to photograph. It was started in January 2010. In the first few months of the program 3000 people signed up to use HiRISE. The first images were released in April 2010. Over 7000 suggestions were made by the public; suggestions were made for targets in each of the 30 quadrangles of Mars. Selected images released were used for three talks at the 16th Annual International Mars Society Convention. Below are some of the over 4,224 images that have been released from the HiWish program as of March 2016.
Some landscapes look just like glaciers moving out of mountain valleys on Earth. Some have a hollowed-out appearance, looking like a glacier after almost all the ice has disappeared. What is left are the moraines—the dirt and debris carried by the glacier. The center is hollowed out because the ice is mostly gone. These supposed alpine glaciers have been called glacier-like forms (GLF) or glacier-like flows (GLF). Glacier-like forms are a later and maybe more accurate term because we cannot be sure the structure is currently moving.
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Possible glacier flowing down a valley and spreading out on a plain. Rectangle shows a portion that is enlarged in the next image.
Enlargement of the area in the rectangle in the previous image. This area would be called a moraine in an alpine glacier on Earth.
Well-developed hollows of concentric crater fill, as seen by HiRISE under the HiWish program.
Glacier on a crater floor, as seen by HiRISE under HiWish program The cracks in the glacier may be crevasses. There is also a gully system on the crater wall.
Glacier coming out of valley, as seen by HiRISE under HiWish program Location is rim of Moreux Crater. Location is Ismenius Lacus quadrangle.
Wide view of tongue-shaped flows, as seen by HiRISE under the HiWish program
Close view of tongue-shaped flows, as seen by HiRISE under the HiWish program
The radial and concentric cracks visible here are common when forces penetrate a brittle layer, such as a rock thrown through a glass window. These particular fractures were probably created by something emerging from below the brittle Martian surface. Ice may have accumulated under the surface in a lens shape; thus making these cracked mounds. Ice being less dense than rock, pushed upwards on the surface and generated these spider web-like patterns. A similar process creates similar sized mounds in arctic tundra on Earth. Such features are called “pingos,”, an Inuit word. Pingos would contain pure water ice; thus they could be sources of water for future colonists of Mars.
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