Prepare to be duped by dunes

August 10, 2016

Admit it—you have no idea what planet this is in the photo above. Answer: this is Earth)

Like a faithful (or possibly obsessive) pen pal, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has sent us postcards from Mars every month for over a decade now. And even though Mars is, indeed, another planet, the more we see of its dunes, craters, and ice caps, the more we can’t help but think, hmm…it all looks a bit familiar, right?

This month’s haul of 1,035 images to our inbox (you sure must miss us, MRO!) is no exception. The mission’s High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, managed by the University of Arizona, Tucson, has captured images of Martian dunes that look like the perfect locations for a remake of the 1962 epic historical drama film, Lawrence of Arabia, or like lost movie stills from Werner Herzog’s 1971 mystic desert flick, Fata Morgana.

In fact, if Mars’ and Earth’s desertscapes were all together in a lineup, we bet you couldn’t tell the difference between the two. Think you know your beloved home planet? Prepare to be duped by dunes.