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Undulating Beauty

Undulating Beauty
Undulating Beauty Among nature’s gifts, dunes exist in a class by themselves. Whatever form they take—from star- or crescent-shaped, to sharp-crested and linear, to sensuous and undulating—they are all fascinating and beautiful. It was late fall in the Aonia Terra region of Mars’ southern hemisphere when the High Resolution Science Experiment (HiRISE) on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged these dunes. In this colorized view, carbon dioxide frost (bright lavender) is just beginning to accumulate on the dunes’ pole-facing slopes and in the troughs between the meter-scale ripples. NASA/JPL/University of Arizona