Click for original image.

Today’s cool image not only shows us some puzzling lava terrain on Mars, it highlights the continuing camera problems on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) that began last month and now appear to be permanent.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 29, 2023 by the high resolution camera on MRO. The black strip through the middle of the picture highlights MRO’s ongoing problem, as described by the science team in its monthly download of new MRO high resolution pictures:

The electronics unit for CCD RED4 started to fail in August 2023 and we have not been acquiring images [data] 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.

The picture shows the failure of this electronics unit. The color strip is now only about half as wide as normal, with the other half the black strip with no data. As the problem first appeared in July, and remains unresolved, it probably is permanent. Though MRO’s high resolution camera can still produce images, they will be less useful, their center strip blank.

This failure should not be a surprise. In fact, it is remarkable that so little has gone wrong with MRO considering its age. The spacecraft was launched in 2005, entered Mars orbit in 2006, and has been working non-stop now for about seventeen years. Moreover, it was built in the early 2000s, making it almost a quarter century old at this point. How much longer it can survive is an open question, but a lifespan of twenty years is usually the limit for most spacecraft. The Hubble Space Telescope however gives us hope MRO can last longer, as Hubble has now been in orbit for 33 years, and continues to operate.

Despite this data loss, the picture still shows some intriguing and puzzling geology

The white dot on the overview map to the right marks the location, with the white rectangle in the inset showing the area covered by the picture. Dubbed “enigmatic terrain” by the science team, its goal was to focus on the knobby features here.

This location is in the middle of the vast lava flood plain dubbed Elysium Planitia, formed from many volcanic flood lava events more than a billion years ago. Most of Elysium is flat and relatively featureless. This area however has these knobs, many of which look like some material pushed up from below to break open the top layer of flood lava (not unlike what treeroots sometimes do to sidewalk paving).

Other possible explanations: Those top broken pieces might be the remains of a top layer that over time has eroded away, or the knobs could also be showing us the very top of a rough topography now buried by that lava. The images suggest all these possibilities. To narrow the answer down requires more data.