Springtime has arrived on Mars as ice melts on the planet's northern ice cap.

A new photo captured by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveals crescent-shaped dunes and melting ice across the Martian surface.

What is it?

This new image from HiRISE, which stands for High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, shows the surface of Chasma Boreale, a large valley in Mars' northern ice cap.

Here, ice melts and recedes in the springtime, some evidence of which can be seen in this image.

In this image, you can also see dunes streaking across the Martian surface. They hold information about the winds on the planet, as you can tell the direction of the wind based on the direction of the dunes' sharp tips.

Why is it incredible?

Chasma Boreale is a valley with walls rising up 4,600 feet (1,400 meters) from its flat floor. Hundreds of millions of miles away from Earth, this barren landscape lies at the planet's northern ice cap.

And yet, however icy cold, desolate, or far away this planet is, it feels the change of springtime just as we do here on Earth.

This image is a visual reminder of the similarities worlds share across the solar system, however different they may be.

NASA's sharp-eyed Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) just notched a big milestone.

MRO's HiRISE ("High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment") camera has now snapped 100,000 photos of the surface of Mars, NASA announced on Tuesday (Dec. 16).

Image number 100,000, which was captured on Oct. 7, "shows mesas and dunes within Syrtis Major, a region about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of Jezero Crater, which NASA's Perseverance rover is exploring," NASA officials said in a statement on Tuesday.

"Scientists are analyzing the image to better understand the source of windblown sand that gets trapped in the region’s landscape, eventually forming dunes," they added.

MRO arrived in orbit around Mars in March 2006, tasked with searching for signs of past water activity on the Red Planet and conducting a variety of other investigations.

HiRISE — which is capable of resolving features as small as a coffee table on the Martian surface — has been key to that wide-ranging mission.

"HiRISE is the instrument the mission relies on for high-resolution images of features ranging from impact craters, sand dunes, and ice deposits to potential landing sites," NASA officials said in the statement. "Those images, in turn, help improve our understanding of Mars and prepare for NASA’s future human missions there."

Though MRO has been operating at Mars for more than 20 years, it's not the longest-lived NASA Red Planet orbiter. That distinction goes to Mars Odyssey, which has been studying the planet from above since October 2001.

MRO and Odyssey are two of nine spacecraft actively studying Mars up close. The others are NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance rovers and five other orbiters: NASA's MAVEN, Europe's Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, China's Tianwen 1 and the United Arab Emirates' Hope mission.

MAVEN may be in trouble, however: It has been silent since Dec. 4 and has apparently begun spinning in an unexpected way.

NASA's newest Mars rover and its trusty helicopter companion were spotted all the way from space in a new photo.

In 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover and the first-ever Mars helicopter Ingenuity landed in Jezero Crater on the surface of the Red Planet. Now, a high-resolution camera on a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars has captured the pair from orbit. 

The new image, snapped on March 31, the HiRISE (high resolution imagine experiment) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows both the rover and helicopter together on the planet's surface. These images come just about 16 years after the camera delivered its first Mars photos. 

Related: 1 year later, Ingenuity helicopter still going strong on Mars

The spacecraft might be a bit hard to spot in the black-and-white image, but annotated versions from the space agency show the pair from above. 

In the image, "Percy" (as Perseverance is known) can be seen sitting on the cracked surface of a large rock formation called "Máaz," the Navajo word for "Mars." About 656 feet (200 meters) to the left of the rover, Ingenuity sits on the bedrock. A number of Martian features have been given names in the Navajo language as part of a collaboration with the Navajo Nation Office of the President and Vice President.

Perseverance was sent to Mars with two main mission objectives: to collect samples for a future return to Earth and to investigate possible evidence of ancient life on the Red Planet. Ingenuity was sent to Mars within the rover. 

While the helicopter was originally only slated to perform a few flights as part of a technology demonstration, its successful performance has now seen the craft perform 22 flights and helping Perseverance in scouting out exploration routes.

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

A NASA Mars probe may have snapped rare baby photos of the Red Planet's bizarre "spiders."

The images, captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), show small, erosion-carved cracks in Red Planet sand dunes. The features may be infant versions of the similar-looking but larger Martian channel-networks that have been dubbed spiders, a recent study suggested.

"We have seen for the first time these smaller features that survive and extend from year to year, and this is how the larger spiders get started," study lead author Ganna Portyankina, of the University of Colorado Boulder said in a statement. "These are in sand-dune areas, so we don't know whether they will keep getting bigger or will disappear under moving sand." [Latest Photos from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter]

The spiders have been spotted only near the Martian south pole. During Mars' southern winter, carbon dioxide ice caps cover this area. When the ice thaws in the spring, deep troughs are carved into the terrain. The crevices vary in size, and multiple channels generally converge at a central point, creating surface features that resemble giant arachnids.

The new images, which MRO took with its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, allow scientists to chart the year-to-year growth of the potential baby spiders for the first time ever, NASA officials said.

HiRISE images captured over the span of three Martian years (which is equal to about 5.7 Earth years) show a growing network of branching channels on sand dunes. While these channels appear to be relatively small, they may help scientists learn more about how the larger spider features form, NASA officials said.

In fact, based on the rate at which the smaller channels have grown over the last three Martian years, researchers estimate it would take more than 1,000 Martian years to sculpt a typical spider feature, said the study, which was published Sept. 22 in the journal Icarus.

Similar grooves have previously been spotted on sand dunes near Mars' north pole; however, those features lasted no longer than a year, as surrounding sand filled them in. The newly reported channels, on the other hand, have grown year to year and formed a branching pattern that closely resembles full-scale spider terrain, NASA officials said.

"There are dunes where we see these dendritic [or branching] troughs in the south, but in this area, there is less sand than around the north pole," Portyankina said in the statement. "I think the sand is what jump-starts the process of carving a channel in the ground."

Sandy terrain is soft enough to be carved by the thawing carbon dioxide, but in order for the channels to persist and expand from year to year, the underlying ground must be relatively hard. Otherwise, loose sand refills the carved terrain and the channels cannot grow into the full-scale spiders observed near Mars' south pole, NASA officials said.

"The combination of very high-resolution imaging and the mission's longevity is enabling us to investigate active processes on Mars that produce detectable changes on time spans of seasons or years," MRO deputy project scientist Leslie Tamppari, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in the NASA statement. "We keep getting surprises about how dynamic Mars is."

Follow Samantha Mathewson @Sam_Ashley13. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been surveying strange "spider-like" surface features on Mars for years, and now citizen scientists are helping the orbiter hone in on areas that require further investigation. 

These prominent surface features are found near Mars' south pole, and are believed to be linked to seasonal changes. The planet's polar ice caps thaw bottom-side first in the spring, causing carbon dioxide to build up and carve deep channels in the terrain, according to a statement from NASA. 

"The trapped carbon dioxide gas that carves the spiders in the ground also breaks through the thawing ice sheet. It lofts dust and dirt that local winds then sculpt into hundreds of thousands of dark fans that are observed from orbit," Meg Schwamb, a planetary scientist from the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, said in the statement. "For the past decade, [the orbiter's instrument] HiRISE has been monitoring this process on other parts of the south pole." [Latest Photos from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter]

The Context Camera (CTX) aboard the MRO captured the images of these spider-like cracks and crevices, which volunteer citizen scientists have analyzed using the website "Planet Four: Terrains." 

With the observations from this citizen science project, NASA has added 20 new regions to the agency's seasonal monitoring campaign on Mars. The orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera will explore these regions in greater detail. 

"It's heartwarming to see so many citizens of planet Earth donate their time to help study Mars," Candice Hansen, HiRISE deputy principal investigator, said in the statement. "Thanks to the discovery power of so many people, we're using HiRISE to take images of places we might not have studied without this assistance."

The new places of interest on Mars include some unexpected spider terrain, areas where the surface is composed of material that was ejected from impact craters. Previously, those areas were not associated with carbon dioxide ice sheets, and therefore not thought to have spider-like crevices. 

The spider cracks may have formed on the material ejected from craters using a different mechanism than the ice sheets, Hansen said. "Perhaps on surfaces that are more erodible, relative to other surfaces, slab ice would not need to be present as long, or [need to be] as thick, for spiders to form. We have new findings, and new questions to answer, thanks to all the help from volunteers," Hansen added.

Follow Samantha Mathewson @Sam_Ashley13. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.