Broken Martian ice sheets?
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 11, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The picture was what the camera team call a “terrain sample,” which usually means the picture was taken not as part of any specific research request, but because there was a gap in the camera’s schedule, and in order to maintain the camera’s temperature the team then picks something to fill that gap.
Because of the relative randomness of such pictures, they sometimes show little of immediate interest. More often than not, however, the camera team chooses well, and snaps something cool.
In this case they achieved the latter. The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, inside the 2,000-mile-long northern mid-latitude strip I dub glacier country. Everything in this region seems covered with glacial and ice debris, and this picture is no different. Rather than a glacier however we have what looks like a broken ice sheet, surrounded by that utterly unique and as-yet unexplained Martian geological feature dubbed brain terrain.
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 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.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 11, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The picture was what the camera team call a “terrain sample,” which usually means the picture was taken not as part of any specific research request, but because there was a gap in the camera’s schedule, and in order to maintain the camera’s temperature the team then picks something to fill that gap.
Because of the relative randomness of such pictures, they sometimes show little of immediate interest. More often than not, however, the camera team chooses well, and snaps something cool.
In this case they achieved the latter. The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, inside the 2,000-mile-long northern mid-latitude strip I dub glacier country. Everything in this region seems covered with glacial and ice debris, and this picture is no different. Rather than a glacier however we have what looks like a broken ice sheet, surrounded by that utterly unique and as-yet unexplained Martian geological feature dubbed brain terrain.
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 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
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