As you read these words here on Earth, 249 million miles away in Mars’ Jezero Crater, a little six-wheeled robot is busy looking for signs that the red planet was once home to life too. Head just another few thousand miles north – past extinct supervolcanoes, thousand-mile-wide impact craters, and towering black sand dunes – and you reach the Corduroy Dunes, a desolate and truly alien landscape.
During Martian winters, more than 3 trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide freezes directly out of the atmosphere, coating the dunes in a blanket of dry ice, trapping them in place and hiding them from view. But when spring arrives, and the ice cap thaws, a sculpted and ever-shifting sci-fi landscape slowly comes to life. And on May 29, 2018, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the Corduroy Dunes in stunning detail for the first time.
Thanks to NASA’s pioneering work we’ve taken the polar dunes of Mars, shrunk them down to 1:10,000 scale, then turned them into a sculpted 3D hoodie that’s programmed by computers and knitted by robots. Designed to mirror the shapes, colours and textures of the planet we’ll one day call home, we’ve turned the landscape into a padded, multidimensional fabric – then used that to create the ultimate chillout hoodie on any planet.