NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snaps a huge boulder that rolled down the slope.

Watch out for tumbling boulders on Mars!

A track about one-third of a mile (500 meters) long on Mars shows where an irregularly shaped boulder careened downhill to its current upright position, seen in a July 3, 2014, image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The shadow cast by the rock in mid-afternoon sunlight reveals it is about 20 feet (6 meters) tall. In the downward-looking image, the boulder is only about 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) wide. It came to rest standing upright. The trail it left on the slope has a pattern that suggests the boulder couldn't roll smoothly or straight due to its shape. Nasa doesn't yet know what dislodged the boulder, but recent speculation suggests it may have been due to a meteor striking one of the larger craters.

Official article and images:
www.nasa.gov...
hirise.lpl.arizona.edu...

Here's a full-scale image crop I made from HiView:

It's cool how you can see some surface detail on the boulder.

Here's a zoomed-in view of the boulder:

There is what looks like a small crater on its top. I have a crazy idea that the boulder rolled down the slope after being hit by a small meteorite.

The track looks like elephants holding each others tails in their trunks walking uphill. Interesting photo for sure. The explanation sounds plausible enough.

There are dozens of HiRISE photos with tracks of rolling boulders, this is nothing new.

it's martian boy scouts going around pushing over natural martian world monuments.
find them punks fine em, put them in jail.

originally posted by: ArMaP
There are dozens of HiRISE photos with tracks of rolling boulders, this is nothing new.

The media have decided to really pick up on this one: Google results for "mars rolling boulder"
Perhaps because of the size of the boulder and the length of the trail (half a kilometer).

a reply to: wildespace

Or for lack of other news.

Anyone can see that those are snowshoe rabbit tracks. Sheeze

It's just a rock!!! I mean, a boulder. It is awesome to see but is not rare, to say the least. Had it an alien riding on top of it or something, or looked like the head of a statue, -THEN it would be star and flag heaven. lol It is cool, though.

Interesting pic because of the simple detail of it!

Could be a meteorite, but a more likely explanation is some kind of seismic event dislodging it. I read that Mars is fairly active in that respect!.

it looks like it bounced down the hill. Follow the track back up to the top of the hill and it looks like there is a small crater where the track starts.I think that thing was airborne and landed near the top of the hill then bounced down the hill.