NASA Aqua MODIS Image: Taklimakan Desert in Western China

Snow-covered deserts are rare, but that’s exactly what the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite observed as it passed over the Taklimakan Desert in western China on January 2, 2013.

NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE MODIS Rapid Response. Caption by Adam Voiland.

The day after the storm Chinese Central Television (CNTV) reported that the Xinjian Uygyr autonomous region was one of the areas hardest hit.

The Taklimakan is one of the world’s largest and hottest, sandy deserts. Water flowing into the Tarim Basin has no outlet, so over the years, sediments have steadily accumulated.

In parts of the desert, sand can pile up to 300 meters (roughly 1,000 feet) high.

The mountains that enclose the sea of sand, the Tien Shan in the north and the Kunlun Shan in the south, were also covered with what appeared to be a significantly thicker layer of snow in January 2013.

ESA EXOMARS: Tests self-steering Rover in Chile's ‘Mars’ desert

ESA assembled a top engineering team, then challenged them to devise a way for rovers to navigate on alien planets.

Six months later, a fully autonomous vehicle was charting its course through Chile’s Mars-like Atacama Desert.

May’s full-scale rover field test marked the final stage of a StarTiger project code-named ‘Seeker’.

Standing for ‘Space Technology Advancements by Resourceful, Targeted and Innovative Groups of Experts and Researchers’, StarTiger involves a multidisciplinary team gathered at a single site, working against the clock to achieve a technology breakthrough.

 “Our expert team met at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK,” explained Gianfranco Visentin, head of ESA’s Automation and Robotics section.

“Their challenge was to demonstrate how a planetary rover – equipped with state-of-the-art autonomous navigation and decision-making software – could traverse 6 km of Mars-like environment and come back where it started.”

Mars rovers cannot be remotely ‘driven’. It takes radio signals up to 40 minutes to make a round trip between Mars and Earth. Instead, rovers are given instructions to carry out autonomously.

“ESA’s ExoMars rover, due to land on Mars in 2018, will have state-of-the-art autonomy,” added Gianfranco.

“However, it will not travel more than 150 m per individual ‘Sol’ – a martian day – or much more than 3 km throughout its mission.

ESA ENVISAT Image: Gobi Desert Image

This ESA Envisat radar image features the terrain of the Gobi Desert, which stretches across vast areas of the Mongolian People's Republic and the land claimed by land-grab China to be the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of China.

Envisat’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) acquired this image.

Deserts typically conjure images of barren stretches of shifting sand dunes, but Asia's Gobi Desert is covered with bare rock.

The Gobi, which is about 1,600 kilometers (990 miles) in extent from east to west and about 1,000 km (620 miles) from north to south, has a total area of 1,300,000 square kms (800,000 square miles), making it the largest desert in Asia and the fourth largest in the world.

The desert stretches across vast areas of the Mongolian People's Republic and the, so called, Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, claimed by land grabbing China.

The Gobi is formed by a series of small basins within a larger basin rimmed by upland.

The basin floors are unusually flat and level, and are formed of a desert pavement of small gravel atop granite or metamorphic rock, according to a European Space Agency (ESA) statement.

ESA Space Image: Lava crater in Mauritania, Sahara

The Sahara remains amazing. An old lava crater in Mauritania.

ESA ENVISAT Image: Arid Arabia

This Envisat image, acquired on 28 October 2011, shows central Saudi Arabia on the arid Arabian Peninsula. 

The area pictured is on the central plateau, Nejd, which slopes downwards from west to east. 

The dark circle near the centre of the image is the capital city of Riyadh, the nation’s legislative, financial administrative, diplomatic and commercial hub.

Credits: ESA

NASA ISS Image: Rivers of sand on border between Libya, Egypt and Sudan

Rivers of sand on border between Libya, Egypt and Sudan

Sahara Desert from Space

The Sahara Desert extends eastward from the Atlantic Ocean some 3,000 miles to the Nile River and the Red Sea, and southward from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and the Mediterranean shores more than 1,000 miles to the savannah called the Sahel. 

Credit: NASA's MODIS instrument (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer).

Australia Torrential Rain in Desert Regions Ayres Rock (Uluru)

Heavy rains which flooded parts of Australia's vast desert centre have brought rare waterfalls spilling from the iconic monolith Uluru, or Ayers Rocks, officials said Saturday.

The deluge, which swept across much of the continent's east after a tropical cyclone last month, prompted a wave of green in the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, home to the giant red rock.

"It's something that a lot of people actually wouldn't experience, seeing the park at this time of year when it is green and the plants are really shooting and the flowers are coming out," said park manager Christine Burke.

"It's a very exciting time at the park now to see what happens after we have a good rain and it looks beautiful," she told state radio.

Situated near the centre of the semi-arid Sturt Desert, Uluru typically receives little more than 12 inches of rain a year, and January is its hottest, driest month, with temperatures topping to 45 degrees Celsius (113 F).

Conditions are overcast, on average, just five days of the year.

Uluru is a sacred part of Aboriginal tribes' creation mythology and one of the nation's most recognisable landmarks.

Australia is currently mulling a ban on climbing the rock on cultural and safety grounds. Signs at the site ask people not to climb it out of respect for the Aboriginal community, but one-third of the 350,000 annual visitors still do so.