Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on January 27, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what the scientists label a “streak-spoke pattern” inside the crater. To my eye, the pattern more resembles hanging draperies, neatly tied near the top and then pulled apart as they descend to the ground.

This photo was a follow-up to a previous picture by MRO on February 4, 2008, more than seven Martian years ago, to see if there had been any identifiable changes in that time. Both images were taken in springtime, and despite the passage of time, the 2023 image shows no obvious changes from the 2008 photo.

What caused this distinct pattern? The first guess would be the wind, except if so shouldn’t there have been some change over seven Martian years?

The white dot north of the Starship candidate landing zone on the overview map to the right marks the location of this crater, at 45 degrees north latitude on the vast Martian northern lowland plains. At this latitude there is a lot of near surface ice, and this crater is no exception. Not only does the terrain around the crater have features that invoke ice (such as cracks), the crater itself appears filled with glacial ice, as indicated by the cracks near the crater’s interior rim.

My wild guess for the creation of this pattern is the Sun itself. At this latitude the Sun would generally be to the south. If the slope of the glacier inside the crater is just right, as the Sun rises in the east, crosses the sky, and then sets in the west, its light could just touch the surface in such a manner as to melt away this kind of pattern, especially as the Sun’s height from the southern horizon rises and falls with the seasons.

This is a wild guess, of course, based on nothing, and is almost certainly utterly wrong. The cause of the pattern could be from many other things, but don’t ask me to name them, for I have no idea what they might be.