Martian mounds surrounded by moats

Martian mounds with moats
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 1, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the camera team labels “Circular Mounds Surrounded by Moats,” which when all the known data is considered are probably caused by a spray of small meteorites landing on a field of ice.

Why ice? The location is at 37 degrees south latitude, in the cratered southern highlands of Mars, where many images show glacial-type features inside many craters. In fact, all the nearby craters at this location appear to have such features, suggesting the presence of near-surface ice trapped in these craters.

The picture actually looks at the floor of another such crater, with the mounds in the image’s upper left the crater’s indistinct central peaks. Though only 8.5 miles wide, the crater is deep, with interior walls that quickly rise 2,800 feet to the rim. That depth further suggests ice, as any snow that fell here in the far past could easily become trapped, inside what could be thought of a cold trap.
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Bubbling but frozen terrain on Mars

Bubbling but frozen terrain on Mars
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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.
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JAXA schedules last H-2A rocket launch, carrying X-Ray telescope and lunar lander

SLIM's landing zone
Map showing SLIM landing zone on the Moon.
Click for interactive map.

Japan’s space agency JAXA today announced that it has finally rescheduled the launch of its XRISM X-Ray telescope and its SLIM lunar lander launch for September 7, 2023, lifting off using the last flight of its H-2A rocket.

The previous launch attempt several weeks ago was scrubbed due to high winds. This new launch date has a window of seven days, which means if weather scrubs the September 7th launch they will be able to try again immediately within that window.

The white dot on the map to the right shows the targeted landing site of SLIM, which is testing the ability of an unmanned probe to land precisely within a tiny zone of less than 300 feet across.

Meanwhile, with the retirement of the H-2A rocket and its replacement having not yet flown successfully (its first launch failed in March), Japan after this launch will be in the same boat as Europe, without a large rocket and lacking the ability to put large payloads into orbit.

Endeavour Dragon capsule carrying four astronauts safely splashes down

SpaceX’s Endeavour Dragon capsule safely splashed down shorty after midnight last night in the Atlantic off the coast of Florida, completing a six month mission for two Americans, one Russian, and one astronaut from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The UAE astronaut, Sultan Al Neyadi, flew as a paying passenger, obtaining his flight through the private space station company Axiom, which in turn purchased the ferrying services to and from ISS from SpaceX. The Russian flew as part of the barter deal that NASA presently has with Russia, with each flying astronauts on the other nation’s capsules at no cost in order to make sure everyone knows how to use them in case of emergency.

Several additional details: First, in the post-splashdown press conference SpaceX officials revealed they are presently building a fifth manned Dragon capsule to add to its fleet, and are also aiming to fly each as much as fifteen times. This suggests they are anticipating a lot of business hauling both NASA and commercial passengers into space.

Meanwhile, the Russian-launched crew on ISS that launched last September and includes American Frank Rubio is targeting a return-to-Earth on September 27, 2023. If so, they will have completed a 371 day flight, or almost thirteen months. This I think is the second longest human flight so far in space, exceeded only by Valeri Polykov’s fourteen-and-half month mission in the 1990s.

Engineers had Vikram do short flight hop prior to shutting down

Indian engineers revealed today that prior to putting the Vikram lander to sleep for the long lunar night, they had the lander use its rocket engines to do a short up and down flight. From the first link:

“On command it (Vikram lander) fired the engines, elevated itself by about 40 cm as expected and landed safely at a distance of 30 to 40 cm away,” ISRO said in an update on ‘X’.

Before doing the hop engineers stored Vikram’s instruments and rover ramp, then redeployed them afterward to gather a tiny bit of new data before putting everything into hibernation.

The hop test proved that Vikram’s engines could be restarted even after being on the Moon for almost two weeks, and thus could potentially be used on a future sample return mission. It also suggested a future mission could choose to change its landing site periodically by use of its landing engines.

Engineers place Pragyan into sleep mode

With lunar sunset looming, engineers have completed all work on both the lander Vikram and the rover Pragyan and have prepared Pragyan as best as possible to survive the long 14-Earth-day long lunar night.

Currently, the battery is fully charged. The solar panel is oriented to receive the light at the next sunrise expected on September 22, 2023. The receiver is kept on.

All data from Vikram’s instruments has been transmitted back to Earth, through the rover. It appears that the mission has been using the rover has the main communications relay, not the lander. It also appears there is no expectation of the lander surviving the lunar night.

Petrified dunes on Mars?

Petrified dunes on Mars?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 31, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

I think the many parallel ridges are likely hardened and petrified dunes of sand because of their craggy nature. Dunes of sand would have a smoother, softer look, and in fact, if you look at some of the dunes inside the depression at the bottom-right of the picture you will see ridges with exactly that look, smooth and curved.

Nor is it unreasonable to believe these ridges are petrified dunes, as orbital data over time has found that many of the dunes on Mars, even those that look active, are not and have likely been hardened for centuries.

As for the ridges running at right angles to each other in the picture’s middle left, I have no idea. Possible we are looking at ancient dykes of lava that pushed up through cracks and faults, but this is pure guess.
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The splatter surrounding a mid-latitude Martian crater

A channel in the splatter of a Martian crater
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on April 12, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists simply label as “Northern Mid-latitude Terrain”.

I have focused in on that meandering channel and the landscape around it. On Earth we would assume that channel marks the drainage of a river or stream, possibly also shaped by a glacier at some point because of its U-shaped profile. This guess is strengthened by the elevation data from MRO, which shows the channel descending to the southwest about 440 feet along its 2.2 mile length.

The channel and the eroded look of the surrounding terrain suggests strongly the presence of near-surface ice at this location, which is not unreasonable based on its 32 degree north latitude. The wider look below only adds further strength to this hypothesis, but also adds a lot more details explaining the genesis of this strange landscape.
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Vikram takes movie of Pragyan rover as it roves

Pragyan as seen by Vikram
Click for movie.

Using one of Vikram’s lander cameras, engineers have produced a short movie of India’s Pragyan rover as it rotated to avoid a small crater about ten feet ahead.

The picture to the right is from that 16-second movie, near its end. It appears that the engineers operating Pragyan were unhappy with almost any route ahead from its present position, as they rotated Pragyan almost 360 degrees, and even attempted forward motion at one point and then resumed rotation.

It is not clear if any of the craters visible in this picture are the crater that caused the detour. The movie however does provide a sense of scale. Pragyan is small, but it is able to maneuver easily using its six wheels.

Buried ridges at the bottom of a Martian abyss

Buried ridges in a Martian abyss
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image could be labeled a “What the heck?!” photo, as the origin of its most distinct feature is utterly baffling. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 18, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what look like a collection of meandering ridges peeking out from a terrain covered by thick dust.

The scientists label this dust-covered ground, as well as the ripple dunes to the south in the full image, “sand sheets.” Without question, the ground here seems to resemble a Sahara-like terrain. It is utterly featureless, other than the few bedrock features that poke up out of that sand. In the full image some peaks stick out, but it the meandering ridges in this section that are most intriguing. They are reminiscent of rimstone dams in caves, but what formed them remains baffling, since cave rimstone dams are formed by the interaction of limestone and water, and there is absolutely no evidence of any near surface ice at this location in the dry equatorial regions of Mars.

All the ridges signify is a buried terrain formed in some inexplicable way.
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Scientists believe they have recovered the first known interstellar meteorite

A scientific expedition in the Pacific off the coast of Papua New Guinea has found what it thinks are spherules from the first known interstellar meteorite that hit the Earth on January 8, 2014 and dubbed IM1. From their preprint paper [pdf]:

On 8 January 2014 US government satellite sensors detected three atmospheric detonations in rapid succession about 84 km north of Manus Island, outside the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea (20 km). Analysis of the trajectory suggested an interstellar origin of the causative object CNEOS 2014-01-08: an arrival velocity relative to Earth in excess of ∼ 45 km s−1, and a vector tracked back to outside the plane of the ecliptic. The object’s speed relative to the Local Standard of Rest of the Milky-Way galaxy, ∼ 60 km s−1, was higher than 95% of the stars in the Sun’s vicinity.

In 2022 the US Space Command issued a formal letter to NASA certifying a 99.999% likelihood that the object was interstellar in origin.

Using a “magnetic sled” that they dragged across the seafloor, the scientists collected about 700 spherules thought to come from the meteorite, of which 57 have been analyzed and found to have properties that confirm their interstellar origin. As they note in their paper, “The spherules with enrichment of beryllium (Be), lanthanum (La) and uranium (U), labeled “BeLaU”, appear to have an exotic composition different from other solar system materials.”

The “BeLaU” elemental abundance pattern does not match terrestrial alloys, fallout from nuclear explosions, magma ocean abundances of Earth, its Moon or Mars or other natural meteorites in the solar system. This supports the interstellar origin of IM1 independently of the measurement of its high speed, as reported in the CNEOS catalog and confirmed by the US Space Command.

Based on the sparse data, the scientists speculate that these spherules could have come from the crust of an exoplanet, the core collapse of a supernova, the merger of two neutron stars, and even possibly “an extraterrestrial technological origin.” They have no idea, but all these are among the possibilities.

Pragyan snaps first pictures of Vikram sitting on the Moon

Vikram as seen by Pragyan
Click for original image.

India’s space agency ISRO has released the first two pictures from the Pragyan rover showing the Vikram lander that bought both to the Moon safely.

The picture to the right is the close-up image, which shows two of Vikram’s science instruments. CHASTE is a probe that has been measuring the temperature of the Moon’s regolith at this spot, while ILSA is a seismometer for measuring the seismicity around the landing site.

Both spacecraft have been on the lunar surface now for one week, which means they are both halfway through their nominal two-week mission that lasts until lunar sunset, occurring on September 4th. Neither were designed to survive the 14-day-long lunar night, though engineers will attempt to kept both alive.

The prevailing winds in Mars’ volcano country

The prevailing winds in Mars' volcano country
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image is actual one new picture and four past images, which taken together reveal something about the larger wind patterns on Mars. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 27, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and shows a tiny wind-swept section of the giant volcanic ash field dubbed the Medusae Fossae Formation, about the size of the subcontinent of India and thought to be source of most of the dust on Mars.

The innumerable parallel thin ridges here all suggest that the prevailing winds blow from the southeast to the northwest. As they blow, the scour the surface ash out, and sometimes reveal the underlying bedrock, which here shows up as those small peaks and a handful of northeast-to-southwest trending larger ridges. Note too that the picture shown is only a small section of the full image, which shows that this landscape continues for a considerable distance in all directions.
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Residue ice in southern mid-latitude Martian crater?

Residue ice in the southern mid-latitudes of Mars?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on April 10, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows an unnamed 1.2-mile-wide crater at about 35 degrees south latitude with what appears to be residual glacial ice hugging its north interior wall.

As this is in the southern hemisphere, the ground immediately below the south-facing interior wall of the crater is going to be in shadow the most, and thus it will also be the place where any surface or near-surface ice will survive the longest. In this case it appears that from the bumpy nature of that residual ice it has also been sublimating away. Within it however remains the faint hint of multiple layers, suggesting about a dozen past climate cycles with each new cycle producing a new but smaller layer with less ice.

The material in the southern half of the crater floor appears to be dust formed into ripple dunes.
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JAXA scrubs launch of X-Ray telescope & SLIM lunar lander due to high winds

SLIM's landing zone
Click for interactive map.

Because of high winds, Japan’s space agency JAXA yesterday scrubbed the last launch of its H2A rocket, carrying the XRISM X-Ray telescope and the SLIM lunar lander.

A nice description of both payloads can be found here. XRISM is a simplified reflight of the Hitomi X-Ray telescope that failed immediately after launch in 2016.

Though SLIM carries a camera and two secondary payloads, both designed to hop along on the surface and obtain some data, its main mission is engineering, testing whether a robotic spacecraft can achieve a precision landing with a target zone of 100 meters, or 310 feet. The map to the right shows SLIM’s landing site, with the white dot in the close-up inset a rough approximation of that entire target zone. If successful this technology will make it possible to put unmanned planetary probes in places previously thought too dangerous or rough.

All three craft are designed to operate for only about fourteen days, during the daylight hours of the 28-Earth-day-long lunar day.

Flow channels on Mars

Flow channels on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 13, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists call a “channel and depression”, though to my eye everything looks like flow channels, descending to the east.

The drop from the narrow northern channel to wider southern channel is about 200 feet, with the small crater on the left sitting about halfway between. To our Earthbound eyes, something clearly flowed downhill from that northern channel into the wider channel. What we don’t know now is what the material was that did the flowing?

Was it liquid water? Glaciers? The overview map below provides some context, though it doesn’t actually provide an answer.
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Both Vikram and Pragyan functioning as planned on the Moon

Pragyan on the Moon
Click to see full movie.

According to tweets from India’s space agency ISRO, both the Vikram lander and the Pragyan rover are functioning as planned on the lunar surface, with the rover successfully activating its two science instruments.

The image to the right, taken by Vikram, shows the rover as it completed its roll down the ramp onto the lunar surface. This is a screen capture from a movie showing that roll down, which you can see by clicking on the picture. Since then it has moved another 26 feet from the lander.

I must add once again that Vikram did not land “on the south pole”, as too many so-called news organizations have been falsely claiming. It landed at about 69 degrees south latitude, quite a distance from that pole, in a flat region with no permanently shadowed craters. It is not specifically looking for water, though its instruments might help explain the orbital data that suggests there are areas on the surface of the Moon where hydrogen is somehow present.

If so many news outlets can’t seem to get these very basic facts about this mission correct, one must ask what else do they get wrong routinely? I don’t ask, because I always assume their information is wrong, check it constantly, and find repeatedly that they get numerous basic facts incorrect, especially when it comes to reporting on politics.

Big mountains everywhere inside Valles Marineris

Big mountains in Valles Marineris
Click for original image.

While the giant canyon Valles Marineris on Mars is known best as the biggest known canyon in the solar system — large enough to cover the continental United States several times over — that size tends to diminish the mountainous nature of its interior. Today’s cool image attempts once again (see for example these earlier posts here, here, here, here, and here) to illustrate that stupendous and mountainous nature.

The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 15, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The goal of the picture was to get a better view of the numerous layers of this terraced cliff wall. What I see, however from my tourist’s perspective, is a steep wall that descends almost 4,500 feet from the high to the low point in just over three miles. This is as steep if not steeper than the walls of the Grand Canyon.
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Where the Martian landscape begins to dry out

Where Mars begins to dry out
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, provides us a glimpse at the lower mid-latitudes of Mars where the terrain is beginning to dry out as we move south. The picture was taken on April 29, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what the scientists label “large linear features.”

The main north-south ridge is only about 20-25 feet high, and its meandering nature (which can be seen more clearly in the full image) suggests it is possibly an inverted channel, formed when the bed of a former canyon gets compressed by the water or ice that flows through it, and when the surrounding terrain gets eroded away that channel bed becomes a ridge.

These ridges however could also possibly be volcanic dikes, where magma had pushed up through fractures and faults to form these more resistant ridges.
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The very tip of a thousand-mile-long crack on Mars

The very tip of a 1000-mile-long Martian crack
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 22, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as “The tip of Cerberus Fossae,” a thousand-mile-long crack in the surface of Mars formed when the ground was pulled apart by underground forces.

If you look closely at the picture’s right edge, you can see that beyond the end of the fissure it actually continues but appears filled with material. In the full picture this however is the end of the crack. Beyond this point the ground is as smooth and as generally featureless as seen within the picture itself, and as also shown in this MRO context camera view of the same area.

Cerberus Fossae is actually three parallel cracks, with this the northernmost one. The eastern tip of the middle crack was previously highlighted in a cool image in July 2022.
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A Martian wedding cake surrounded by brain terrain

Brain terrain surrounding a Martian wedding cake
Click for original image.

Of all many cool images I’ve posted, today might take the cake (pun intended) for the best illustration of the alien nature of Mars. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 28, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what the scientists simply label as “flow features.”

I personally don’t see any obvious flow features in the full image, unless one wants to call the brain terrain that covers this entire plain a flow feature. Brain terrain is a feature unique to Mars whose origin remains a mystery to geologists. As noted by scientists in captioned MRO image in 2019:

You are staring at one of the unsolved mysteries on Mars. This surface texture of interconnected ridges and troughs, referred to as “brain terrain” is found throughout the mid-latitude regions of Mars.

…This bizarrely textured terrain may be directly related to the water-ice that lies beneath the surface. One hypothesis is that when the buried water-ice sublimates (changes from a solid to a gas), it forms the troughs in the ice. The formation of these features might be an active process that is slowly occurring since HiRISE [MRO’s high resolution camera] has yet to detect significant changes in these terrains.

The wedding cake inside the small crater to the upper right only adds to the alienness of this terrain.
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Watch the landing attempt of Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram lander on August 23, 2023


Click for interactive map.

After separating from its Chandrayaan-3 propulsion module on August 17, 2023, India’s Vikram lunar lander has been slowly making orbital adjustments in preparation for its landing attempt on August 23rd.

I have embedded the live stream of that landing attempt below. As it is scheduled for 6:04 pm (India time), in India, in the U.S. that landing will occur in the early morning hours of August 23rd.

Following the failed crash on the Moon of Russia’s lunar lander Luna-25 yesterday, this landing attempt is likely to garner a lot more interest. It is also India’s second attempt, having failed in 2019 when its Vikram lander ran out of fuel before landing and crashed.
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Mars’ endless cycles of glacial activity

Overview map

Mars' endless cycles of glacial activity
Click for original image.

While the images being sent to us from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) repeatedly show features that appear convincingly like glaciers, the data is also beginning to tantalize us with evidence of the endless glacial cycles that have occurred on Mars.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 27, 2023 by MRO’s high resolution camera. The red dot in the inset of the overview map above shows the location, the western flanks of an apron that surrounds a 3,800-foot-high mesa in the chaos region Deuteronilus Mensae, the western end of the 2,000-mile-long mid-latitude strip of chaos regions I dub glacier country, because every image seems to show some form of glacial feature.

Today’s picture is no different. The apron shown here drops the last 1,000 feet of the mesa’s total 3,800-foot height, during which it shows dozens of what the scientists label “parallel lines.” These lines likely reveal the layers of glacial ice in this apron, with the older layers larger and more extensive. Apparently, with each growth cycle the glacier obtained less snow from the atmosphere, so the more recent layers grew less.

In other words, the amount of water on Mars has been declining with time.

Untangling these numerous layers will undoubtedly give us a remarkably detailed history of Mars entire geological history. Unfortunately, that untangling cannot happen until we have boots on the ground, on Mars, able to drill core samples from many different places.

Luna-25 takes first image of lunar surface

Luna-25's first lunar image
Click for interactive map. Zeeman is located on the lower left.

Russia’s state-run press today issued the first picture taken by Luna-25 after entering lunar orbit two days ago. That picture, to the right and cropped and reoriented to post here, shows part of Zeeman Crater at 75 degrees south latitude and 135 degrees west, on the far side of the Moon. From the TASS announcement:

“The Luna-25 spacecraft, flying in a circular orbit as the Moon’s artificial satellite, has taken pictures of the lunar surface with television cameras of the STS-L system. The image, taken today at 08:23 Moscow time, shows the southern polar crater Zeeman on the far side of the Moon. The coordinates of the crater center are 75 degrees south and 135 degrees west,” the state corporation said. Roscosmos said the Zeeman crater is of great interest to researchers. Its rim rises eight kilometers above its relatively flat floor.

The picture shows Zeeman’s southern rim to the left, with its pockmarked crater floor to the right. The crater the lander is targeting, Broguslawsky Crater, sits in the opposite hemisphere of Zeeman, slightly closer to the south pole but on the Moon’s near side.

The inexplicable behavior of Martian dust devils

The inexpicable behavior of Martian dust devils
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image illustrates the puzzling inclination of Martian dust devils to strongly favor specific regions on the Martian surface, for reasons that at present no one can confidently explain.

The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 28, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a plethora of dust devil tracks, almost all of which have an east-west orientation. Moreover, the tracks seem uninfluenced by the surface topography, continuing on their path without deviation, even as they cross cliffs, craters, and mounds. The orientation tells us the direction of the prevailing winds, though I don’t know if those winds blow to the east or to the west.

What makes this image revealing is that a gathering of such dust devil tracks is seen so rarely in other MRO high resolution photographs. I look at a lot of MRO pictures, and though dust devil tracks are not rare, most images don’t show this many. Apparently, there are specific conditions on Mars that cause a lot of tracks to appear in specific locations, either because atmospheric conditions create a lot more dust devils, or the ground conditions allow the tracks to become more visible.
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Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram lander separates from its propulsion module; Luna-25 in lunar orbit


Click for interactive map.

The two probes aiming to land in the high southern latitudes of the Moon in the next week are now both in lunar orbit and preparing for their planned landings.

First India’s Chandrayaan-3: With its propulsion module having completed the job of getting Chandrayaan-3 from Earth to lunar orbit, the Vikram lander today separated from that module in preparation for firing its own engines on August 23, 2023 and landing on the Moon.

Vikram needs to make several orbital adjustments before that landing attempt.

Second, Russia’s Luna-25 probe entered lunar orbit yesterday, where it will spend the next few days making its own orbital adjustments before attempting its landing on August 21st.

Vikram carries a small rover, Pragyan. Luna-25 is only a lander, though it has a scoop and will do analysis of the lunar soil below it. Neither is landing “near the south pole”, as most news sources are saying. They are landing at latitudes comparable to landing in the Arctic on Earth, on the northern coast of Alaska. As such, neither will find out anything about the question of remnant ice in south pole’s permanently shadowed regions.

An avalanche in the West Virginia of Mars

An avalanche in the West Virginia of Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on June 27, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

I have cropped it to focus on this one hill, about 900 feet high (though the elevation data from MRO is somewhat uncertain at this resolution), because of that major landslide on its northern slopes. At some point in the past a major piece of the exposed bedrock at the top broke off and slide about halfway down the mountain, almost as a unit, settling on the alluvial fill that comprises the bottom half of the hill’s flanks.

The bedrock surrounding the peak is also of interest because of its gullies, all of which were created by downward flowing material. Was it ice? Water? Sand? Or maybe a combination of two or three? If water or ice was involved it was a very long time ago, as this location is in the dry equatorial regions of Mars. There is little known near-surface ice here.
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The impact that almost cracked Mars open

An irregular pit chain on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 25, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label an “irregular pit chain,” made up of a series of depressions scattered along a line that extends more than sixty miles to the northeast and to the southwest, beyond the edges of this high resolution close-up.

The chain likely indicates the existence of a fault line, or crack that created a void underground in which surface material is sinking. What makes this crack or fault line significant is how it and other similar fissures or cracks map across the Martian surface, extending for thousands of miles far beyond this particular pit chain and covering almost half the planet. In aggregate they imply the occurrence of past geological events so stupendous they are difficult to comprehend.
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Ingenuity’s 55th flight completed

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

The Ingenuity engineering team today updated the helicopter’s flight log, showing that the 55th flight occurred on August 12, 2023, one day later than originally planned, and flew 881 feet for 143 seconds, 61 feet and 9 seconds longer than planned.

The overview map above shows the present locations of both Perseverance and Ingenuity. The green dot marks Ingenuity’s new position, while the blue dot marks where Perseverance presently sits in Jezero Crater. Based on this map, the main goal of the flight was apparently to fly Ingenuity over a route that Perseverance will likely use to return to its planned route, as indicated by the red dotted line.

Residual ice on the shaded north-facing slope of northern Martian crater

Residual ice on Mars?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on April 10, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). In the headline I am speculating a bit when I call that pile of material bunched up against the interior slope of this unnamed 18-mile-wide crater residual ice. No data is available to me that proves that assumption, but the look, the location, and the general previous data from Mars all tell me that this is what it is.

First, the location within the crater. Everyone who has lived in the northern latitudes where snow falls knows that snow will remain in the shaded slopes that face north — where less direct sunlight falls — much longer than in places where there is more sunlight. You can sometimes even find this residual snow as late as June and July in some such spots.

This phenomenon will be no different on Mars. In those alcoves this material, which looks exactly like glacial features found in many other places in the mid-latitudes of Mars (such as inside the small half-mile-wide crater in the lower left), is well protected, so that even when the rest of the ice sublimated away within the crater it remained. The cliff wall rises five hundred feet to the south, blocking sunlight so that for most of the year little directly sunlight touches this surface.
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