HiWish is a program created by NASA so that anyone can suggest a place for the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to photograph. It was started in January 2010. In the first few months of the program 3000 people signed up to use HiRISE. The first images were released in April 2010. Over 12,000 suggestions were made by the public; suggestions were made for targets in each of the 30 quadrangles of Mars. Selected images released were used for three talks at the 16th Annual International Mars Society Convention. Below are some of the over 4,224 images that have been released from the HiWish program as of March 2016.

Some landscapes look just like glaciers moving out of mountain valleys on Earth. Some have a hollowed-out appearance, looking like a glacier after almost all the ice has disappeared. What is left are the moraines—the dirt and debris carried by the glacier. The center is hollowed out because the ice is mostly gone. These supposed alpine glaciers have been called glacier-like forms (GLF) or glacier-like flows (GLF). Glacier-like forms are a later and maybe more accurate term because we cannot be sure the structure is currently moving.

Analysis of SHARAD data led researchers to conclude that martian glaciers are 80% pure ice. The paper authors examined five different sites and all showed high levels of pure water ice.

Because of the high purity of the ice content that was found, the authors argued that the formation of glaciers happened by atmospheric precipitation or direct condensation. After glaciers were formed there was a time when enhanced sublimation formed a lag layer or promoted the accumulation of dry debris atop the water ice glacier. Those dry debris would then insulate the underlying ice from going away.

The radial and concentric cracks visible here are common when forces penetrate a brittle layer, such as a rock thrown through a glass window. These particular fractures were probably created by something emerging from below the brittle Martian surface. Ice may have accumulated under the surface in a lens shape; thus making these cracked mounds. Ice being less dense than rock, pushed upwards on the surface and generated these spider web-like patterns. A similar process creates similar sized mounds in arctic tundra on Earth. Such features are called "pingos", an Inuit word. Pingos would contain pure water ice; thus they could be sources of water for future colonists of Mars. Many features that look like the pingos on the Earth are found in Utopia Planitia (~35-50° N; ~80-115° E).

There is great deal of evidence that water once flowed in river valleys on Mars. Pictures from orbit show winding valleys, branched valleys, and even meanders with oxbow lakes. Mars probably once even had an ocean. Some are visible in the pictures below.

Streamlined shapes represent more evidence of past flowing water on Mars. Water shaped features into streamlined shapes.

Many locations on Mars have sand dunes. The dunes are covered by a seasonal carbon dioxide frost that forms in early autumn and remains until late spring. Many martian dunes strongly resemble terrestrial dunes but images acquired by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have shown that martian dunes in the north polar region are subject to modification via grainflow triggered by seasonal CO₂ sublimation, a process not seen on Earth. Many dunes are black because they are derived from the dark volcanic rock basalt. Extraterrestrial sand seas such as those found on Mars are referred to as "undae" from the Latin for waves.