Bubbling but frozen terrain on Mars
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 8, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows some of the more unusual terrain found at the higher latitudes in the Martian northern lowland plains.
How do we explain this strange landscape? Based on what little we presently know about Mars, at 40 degrees north latitude this bubbly-looking surface probably indicates the presence of a lot of near-surface ice that at some time in the past was heated for some reason and thus bubbled upward to form these mounds. Think of tomato soup simmering.
Unlike simmering tomato soup, this terrain is solid and no longer bubbling. We are looking at a soup that has frozen even as it bubbled. The process could have been like an ice volcano, the ice turning to thick slurry that froze quickly, like lava. Or it could have happened fast, and then froze to remain unchanging in the eons since.
The white dot in the upper right of the overview map to the right marks this location, deep within Utopia Basin, one of Mars’ biggest ancient impact basins.
As all the pictures from both MRO and Europe’s Mars Express have been demonstrating, Mars is a very icy place once you get above 30 degrees latitude. This picture simply shows us another example. Mars is not the dry desert planet of science fiction, but a planet of a wide variety of deserts, from the very dry equatorial regions to the very icy poles. Though the water is locked in ice, it will not be difficult to access, so future colonists will have an ample supply, once they begin figuring out the best places to establish their human settlements.
One last note (though I admit I might be burying the lede by putting this information here): In today’s release of new high resolution images from MRO, the camera team noted the following:
The electronics unit for CCD RED4 started to fail in August 2023 and we have not been acquiring images in this central swath of the images. The processing pipelines will be updated to fill this gap with the IR10 data for some products. The 3-color coverage is now reduced in width.
As you can see, all the new high resolution images have a black strip where no data is available. It is as yet unclear how badly this will impact future imagery from MRO.
The failure should not surprise us however. MRO was launched in 2005 and has been in orbit around Mars since 2006. After eighteen years it is actually remarkable how little has gone wrong with the orbiter in that time.
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, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 8, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows some of the more unusual terrain found at the higher latitudes in the Martian northern lowland plains.
How do we explain this strange landscape? Based on what little we presently know about Mars, at 40 degrees north latitude this bubbly-looking surface probably indicates the presence of a lot of near-surface ice that at some time in the past was heated for some reason and thus bubbled upward to form these mounds. Think of tomato soup simmering.
Unlike simmering tomato soup, this terrain is solid and no longer bubbling. We are looking at a soup that has frozen even as it bubbled. The process could have been like an ice volcano, the ice turning to thick slurry that froze quickly, like lava. Or it could have happened fast, and then froze to remain unchanging in the eons since.
The white dot in the upper right of the overview map to the right marks this location, deep within Utopia Basin, one of Mars’ biggest ancient impact basins.
As all the pictures from both MRO and Europe’s Mars Express have been demonstrating, Mars is a very icy place once you get above 30 degrees latitude. This picture simply shows us another example. Mars is not the dry desert planet of science fiction, but a planet of a wide variety of deserts, from the very dry equatorial regions to the very icy poles. Though the water is locked in ice, it will not be difficult to access, so future colonists will have an ample supply, once they begin figuring out the best places to establish their human settlements.
One last note (though I admit I might be burying the lede by putting this information here): In today’s release of new high resolution images from MRO, the camera team noted the following:
The electronics unit for CCD RED4 started to fail in August 2023 and we have not been acquiring images in this central swath of the images. The processing pipelines will be updated to fill this gap with the IR10 data for some products. The 3-color coverage is now reduced in width.
As you can see, all the new high resolution images have a black strip where no data is available. It is as yet unclear how badly this will impact future imagery from MRO.
The failure should not surprise us however. MRO was launched in 2005 and has been in orbit around Mars since 2006. After eighteen years it is actually remarkable how little has gone wrong with the orbiter in that time.
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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