Photos: Mars orbiter's abstract impressions

NASA this week began showing off more than 1,500 new images of the surface of Mars, taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRise) camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. In browsing through the cropped detail images, we couldn't help but be struck by the sense that we were wandering through an art gallery of striking, and often abstract, impressions of our next-door neighbor in the solar system.

This image, according to NASA's terse caption, is of potential high-temperature mineral deposits in the Terra Tyrrhena Knob.