Dr. Bill Boynton

A sea of dark dunes, sculpted by the wind into long lines, surrounds the northern polar cap covering an area as big as Texas.

THEMIS Support for Landing Site Selection

This image from NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft shows part of the caldera floor of Arsia Mons. Arsia Mons is the southernmost of the Tharsis volcanoes. It is 270 miles in diameter, almost 12 mi...

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This movie begins with an animation (artist's rendering) of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft above Mars. The scene zooms into an "X-ray" view of the spacecraft, revealing the High Reso...

Valleys much younger than well-known ancient valley networks on Mars are evident near the informally named "Heart Lake" on Mars. This map presents color-coded topographical information overlaid ont...

In Ares Vallis, teardrop mesas extend like pennants behind impact craters, where the raised rocky rims diverted the floods and protected the ground from erosion.

Sand-laden jets shoot into the polar sky in this view by noted space artist Ron Miller.

Although it is 45 kilometers (28 miles) wide, countless layers of ice and dust have all but buried Udzha Crater.

At the time this video was released, the Odyssey team had successfully completed the third trajectory correction maneuver to adjust the spacecraft's flightpath toward its final aimpoint for entry i...

Fans and ribbons of dark sand dunes creep across the floor of Bunge Crater in response to winds blowing from the direction at the top of the picture.

Artist rendering of commercial Mars satellites providing communications back to Earth.

This unnamed channel is located in Xanthe Terra.

Color coding in this map of a far-northern site on Mars indicates the change in nighttime ground-surface temperature between summer and fall. This site, like most of high-latitude Mars, has water i...

Download a PDF of the Mars as Art Booklet.

Getting to Mars is difficult enough -- staying there is even more challenging. Odyssey met up with Mars on October 24 02:26 UTC (October 23: 7:26 p.m. PDT/10:26 p.m.EDT).

Snow falls and ice and frost form on Mars, too. NASA's spacecraft on and orbiting the Red Planet reveal the similarities to and differences from how we experience winter on Earth.  

The floor of this unnamed crater in Aonia Terra has been filled with multiple layers of material.

This image shows two small tributaries, just east of where they join Shalbatana Vallis.

Artist's concept of future humans on Mars.

How can you communicate with Mars spacecraft when the Sun is in the way? Learn more about 'solar conjunction' in this 60-second video.

Ius Chasma is unique from the other chasmata of Valles Marineris in possessing mega gullies on both sides of the chasma. This image was captured by NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft.

Mars radiation levels are two to three times higher than around Earth.

This view of an area about 140 kilometers (about 90 miles) wide in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars shows the region around NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity.

Gale Crater, home to NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, shows a new face in this image made using data from the THEMIS camera on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter.