Martian Impact Crater Features Colorful Central Peak (Photo)

This unnamed crater was photographed by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), a camera onboard on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Here on Mars, simple bowl-shaped craters become more complex when they reach about seven kilometers in diameter, because Martian gravity leads the wall slopes to collapse inward and form central peaks.

In the process, material surfaces from deep below, revealing ancient minerals. The color variations in these rocks were probably caused by water activity in the red planet’s early history.

A hyperspectral image taken simultaneously by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), also on MRO, appears to show a variety of minerals are present there, causing this multicolored display.