Filled and distorted craters on Mars
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated and cropped to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on May 25, 2020. The entire image was dubbed “Cluster of Filled Craters”, but I decided to highlight the crater of the cluster that was most strangely distorted of them all. The material that fills all the craters in the full image is almost certainly buried ice and is dubbed concentric crater fill by scientists.
This crater is located in the northern lowland plains the mid-latitudes between 30 and 60 degrees, where planetary scientists have found ample evidence of many such filled craters and glaciers.
Not only does the crater’s interior seemed filled with glacial material, its distorted rim suggests that it has been reshaped by glacial activity that might have covered it entirely over the eons as the mid-latitude glaciers of Mars waxed and waned with the extreme shifts that happen regularly to Mars’ rotational tilt. Moreover, there is strong evidence that in these lowland northern plains an underground ice table exists close to the surface, allowing for more distortion over time.
The overview map below provides some location context.
The white cross indicates the location in Utopia Basin of this crater image. I have posted numerous images showing similar squishy features in Utopia. This plain is also the prime landing site in 2021 for China’s rover from its Tianwen-1 mission, now on its way to Mars. That rover will likely land to the east, just beyond the right edge of this map.
The two mensae regions, Protonilus and Nilosyrtis, to the west and in the same glacial latitude bands, are regions I call glacier country, because numerous glaciers appear to exist on almost all the slopes of the numerous canyons and mesas and buttes of this chaos terrain.
Jezero Crater is the targeted landing site for the Perseverance rover, set to land February 18, 2021. Jezero is about 18 degrees north latitude, which puts it well south of the northern hemisphere’s glacial band. Nonetheless, the strange delta flow into the crater that caused scientists to pick this landing site suggests some sort of liquid or mud flow.
Increasingly the evidence points to Mars as being a place with a lot of frozen water, with much of it apparently very close to the surface, if not on the surface and only protected by a thin layer of debris.
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 full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated and cropped to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on May 25, 2020. The entire image was dubbed “Cluster of Filled Craters”, but I decided to highlight the crater of the cluster that was most strangely distorted of them all. The material that fills all the craters in the full image is almost certainly buried ice and is dubbed concentric crater fill by scientists.
This crater is located in the northern lowland plains the mid-latitudes between 30 and 60 degrees, where planetary scientists have found ample evidence of many such filled craters and glaciers.
Not only does the crater’s interior seemed filled with glacial material, its distorted rim suggests that it has been reshaped by glacial activity that might have covered it entirely over the eons as the mid-latitude glaciers of Mars waxed and waned with the extreme shifts that happen regularly to Mars’ rotational tilt. Moreover, there is strong evidence that in these lowland northern plains an underground ice table exists close to the surface, allowing for more distortion over time.
The overview map below provides some location context.
The white cross indicates the location in Utopia Basin of this crater image. I have posted numerous images showing similar squishy features in Utopia. This plain is also the prime landing site in 2021 for China’s rover from its Tianwen-1 mission, now on its way to Mars. That rover will likely land to the east, just beyond the right edge of this map.
The two mensae regions, Protonilus and Nilosyrtis, to the west and in the same glacial latitude bands, are regions I call glacier country, because numerous glaciers appear to exist on almost all the slopes of the numerous canyons and mesas and buttes of this chaos terrain.
Jezero Crater is the targeted landing site for the Perseverance rover, set to land February 18, 2021. Jezero is about 18 degrees north latitude, which puts it well south of the northern hemisphere’s glacial band. Nonetheless, the strange delta flow into the crater that caused scientists to pick this landing site suggests some sort of liquid or mud flow.
Increasingly the evidence points to Mars as being a place with a lot of frozen water, with much of it apparently very close to the surface, if not on the surface and only protected by a thin layer of debris.
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
My initial interpretation of the miss-shaped crater was that it was the product of two asteroids that orbit each other striking Mars at the same time.
Terrence: If you look at the full image, you will see that this is not the only crater distorted, though none as much as this one. While this could have been caused by a multi-impact, I have my doubts.
Do a search on BtB for Utopia, and you will see a lot of similar strange-looking craters, all suggesting there was a lot of ice at impact that melted, causing the strange shapes, that were also later distorted by other processes.
Recent hypothesis confirm the glacier theory.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/08/04/snowball-mars/
I still believe a nearby supernova sent a cloud of gas and dust up the local chimney impacting our entire solar system. Collapsed our atmosphere by burning hydrogen with our oxygen, filling our oceans, killing the dinosaurs, giving us too much nitrogen that was not native to our planet causing the first of many ice ages.
Mars, Europa, and most of the outer moons we’re also covered in ice/frozen gases. After all this time, the carbon dioxide ice caps on Mars is all that is left of a once ice covered world. All that is above ground evaporated away and was removed by the solar wind.
Max wrote, “After all this time, the carbon dioxide ice caps on Mars is all that is left of a once ice covered world. All that is above ground evaporated away and was removed by the solar wind.”
There is a big problem with this hypothesis of yours. It doesn’t fit the facts. The CO2 dry ice caps on Mars, that come and go seasonally, lie on top of large permanent ice caps of water.
In fact, as a regular reader of BtB, I can’t imagine how you can even posit a theory that says there is no water left on Mars. It seems I post something almost every day illustrating the gobs of ice they are finding in the mid-latitudes and higher.
Late to the post but a meteor approaching at a very close angle to the surface could have produced this distorted shape. Traveling from the relative west the impact energy could have died out as it propagated toward the east resulting in a lesser slope of the walls.
I don’t know why I post this stuff here but it’s a bit fun to guess. Maybe some other folks will be inclined to use their imaginations.