Barren land on Mars
Click for original image.
It might seem strange to call any particular place on Mars “barren” when the entire planet has no visible signs of life anywhere. However, much of the surface of Mars involves wind and ice features that show evidence of change and evolution over time. The presence of apparent near-surface ice and glacial features in almost every image located above 30 degrees latitude emphasizes this sense of potential life, even if that life will only be transported from Earth and established there someday by humans.
Today’s cool image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, has none of these features. It is dry barren bedrock, with only a faint scattering of Martian dust indicated by many faint dust devil tracks.
The picture was taken on March 13, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The largest and most distinct flat-topped mesa in the image is only about 100 feet high, with the north-south ridgeline to the south about 20 feet high.
The black dot about a thousand miles west of Perseverance and on the northwest edge of the lava flood plain deposited by the shield volcano Syrtis Major marks the location of this barren terrain. Not only is its barrenness evident in the section I have cropped, it is also evident in the full picture, as well as in the wider view of MRO’s context camera in a picture taken on June 10, 2020. This ancient ground is so eroded that many of its craters are worn away, leaving behind a broken surface of small ridges, random cliffs, and scattered depressions and plateaus, all of which are only tens of feet higher than the lowest surrounding low points.
The location might have once had glacial ice. In fact, it resembles in some ways chaos terrain, which is thought to have formed from erosion by such glaciers. It is however a very long time since ice was present here. Instead, it looks like the surface has been eroded by eons of the wind and dust devils in Mars very thin atmosphere. Now all we have is bedrock and a thin layer of dust too small to even form dunes.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Click for original image.
It might seem strange to call any particular place on Mars “barren” when the entire planet has no visible signs of life anywhere. However, much of the surface of Mars involves wind and ice features that show evidence of change and evolution over time. The presence of apparent near-surface ice and glacial features in almost every image located above 30 degrees latitude emphasizes this sense of potential life, even if that life will only be transported from Earth and established there someday by humans.
Today’s cool image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, has none of these features. It is dry barren bedrock, with only a faint scattering of Martian dust indicated by many faint dust devil tracks.
The picture was taken on March 13, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The largest and most distinct flat-topped mesa in the image is only about 100 feet high, with the north-south ridgeline to the south about 20 feet high.
The black dot about a thousand miles west of Perseverance and on the northwest edge of the lava flood plain deposited by the shield volcano Syrtis Major marks the location of this barren terrain. Not only is its barrenness evident in the section I have cropped, it is also evident in the full picture, as well as in the wider view of MRO’s context camera in a picture taken on June 10, 2020. This ancient ground is so eroded that many of its craters are worn away, leaving behind a broken surface of small ridges, random cliffs, and scattered depressions and plateaus, all of which are only tens of feet higher than the lowest surrounding low points.
The location might have once had glacial ice. In fact, it resembles in some ways chaos terrain, which is thought to have formed from erosion by such glaciers. It is however a very long time since ice was present here. Instead, it looks like the surface has been eroded by eons of the wind and dust devils in Mars very thin atmosphere. Now all we have is bedrock and a thin layer of dust too small to even form dunes.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News