NASA captures Mars winter wonderland of megadunes and cube-shaped snowflakes

Winter on Mars transforms the Red Planet into something spectacular, but it's not quite like like a Hallmark greeting card's holiday scene. Temperatures at the planet's poles plummet to bone-chilling lows of minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit. Although humans are years from colonizing Mars, NASA's robotic rovers on the planet reveal a few discoveries about the colder season. The HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured these images of sand dunes covered by frost just after winter solstice The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been in orbit for more than 16 years and has returned over 436 terabits of data back to NASA. Mars is the fourth planet from the sun, with a'near-dead' dusty, cold, desert world with a very thin atmosphere.