Abstract and affecting, the new Mars pictures are a confrontation with the sublime

nasa mars photograph
Stillness and strangeness ... Nasa’s image of the Mojave Crater in the Xanthe Terra region of Mars. Photograph: Nasa


One of the greatest reports the spoof newspaper the Onion ever produced was about the moon landings. "Holy shit," the headline screamed. "Man Walks On Fucking Moon". Underneath, the story informed us that Neil Armstrong's first words on touching the lunar surface were "Holy living fuck!"

As well as being funny, this pointed to a truth: what else does landing on the moon boil down to? I experienced a version of those feelings myself last week, looking at new photographs beamed back from the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter satellite. I was transfixed. I don't think I've seen images more beautiful and affecting for a long time.

One shot, from Mars's north pole, shows an ice formation two miles thick: colossal grey-white slabs of frozen carbon dioxide shelving irregularly, their vertical faces powdered with rust by the Martian wind. Another shows linear dunes like planetary corduroy. There is an impact crater, serrated at its edges, bowl-smooth within, a honeycomb pattern deep in its base like something mycelial, or the surface of tripe.

Elsewhere there are what appear to be vertical mineral formations bristling from the lines of ridges, like stands of trees; in fact, they are the tracks of debris released by melting ice, tumbling down the dunes. Another image shows salt flats – perhaps miles across, yet looking like close-up photographs of salt-crystals. A sand dune in Proctor Crater has the sinuous geometry of a Bridget Riley, and is surrounded by a pattern of ripple-textures like the marks left when you pull a piece of paper off the surface of thick paint. It has been coloured steel-blue.

Then there are the moons: Phobos, photographed from no further away than the distance between London and New Delhi, grey-white, like a knob of bone; or Deimos, a pebble in space only a few miles across, with every intricate little pockmark and scar visible.

These are tens of millions of miles away from earth. You feel it shouldn't be possible to see these things. What is it that makes them so powerful? As images alone they have an impersonal beauty, a compelling stillness and strangeness. Some of them look a lot like abstract art, even though they are representative: a compilation of terabits of data sent back by the HiRise (High Resolution Imagine Science Experiment) telescope, translated into the visible spectrum.

Part of their power is, I think, to do with scale. Thanks in part to the computer colouring and the almost unnatural-seeming level of resolution, many of these photographs look like images from electron microscopy. The surface of a moth's wing suddenly looks like the surface of a planet; the surface of a planet looks like a moth's wing. Look at these photographs of Mars, and you often can't tell if you're looking at miles, or metres, or microns. It's a scale with nothing human to anchor it. It suggests an unsettling kinship between the alienness of both the very tiny and the very large.

Time, as well as physical scale, plays a part. The poet Elizabeth Bishop used to say that when she was miserable, as she frequently was, she felt comforted by thinking about things in terms of geological time. There's a special kind of shiver in the idea that these steppes of frozen CO2 were there, and that these curved dunes were shifting millions of years before humans existed – just as there is in knowing that the night sky is punctuated with the light from dead stars.

But these images are especially potent because we know they are from Mars. Outer space now holds a place in the collective imagination – and in our art and literature – that, in previous centuries, was held by the sea: a repository of everything that is threatening and enticing and other. Outer space is the locus, as the sea was for island people writing Anglo-Saxon poems, of the idea of a special sort of loneliness, a confrontation with the sublime.

Mars, especially among the planets, has taken the place of the mythic island: of Ultima Thule. Carl Sagan once said that Mars was "a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our earthly hopes and fears". This is the Mars not of comical little green men, but of Ray Bradbury's haunting stories – Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed, for instance. It's the Mars Doctor Manhattan visits when he leaves Earth in Watchmen. It's the Mars, emotionally, of the chorus in David Bowie's Life on Mars.

These photographs inspire not only awe and wonder, but also a sort of longing. None of us alive at this moment – possibly no human ever – will see these landscapes with our own eyes. And yet here are the pictures. For me, they have the same effect as great paintings or photographs – a feeling that something impossible has been made present, while remaining just out of reach. That a man and a woman are standing in a room that has never existed, or that a moment in time, irretrievably lost, is just the other side of a pane of glass. It comforts and it saddens. Holy shit, indeed.

For more photographs, go to theguardian.com/science/space