Tag: exploration

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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 10, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

My reason to posting this I admit is selfish and tourist-oriented. This narrow ridge, about a mile long and about 300 to 600 feet high, appeals directly to my hiking passions. A trail along its length would provide any hiker some really spectactular views.

The scientists took the picture because of the geology. The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, a short channel dubbed Daga Vallis that connects two major canyons in the eastern part of Valles Marineris, the largest known canyon system in the solar system. This ridge and several nearby parallel ridges were apparently made of something, possibly lava, that was resistent to the theorized ancient catastrophic floods that scientists presently believe carved out these channels and canyons.

In the inset the dotted line indicates one possible hiking trail route that travels the full length of the ridge but then heads south to continue along the rim of a 1,200-foot-high cliff face. For future Martian colonists, I offer this site as a great place to set up a bed-and-breakfast, surrounded by many potential hikes of incredible stark beauty.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 17, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, inside a thirty-mile-wide dune sea, or erg, that sits in the center of the floor of 80-mile-wide Russell Crater.

That erg is interesting in that it appears the dunes get larger and larger as you move from the perimeter to its center. Thus, the dunes in the picture are called mega-dunes, about 200-feet-high. They dwarf the smaller dunes at the erg’s edge.

This picture was taken as part of a long term monitoring program to track the coming and going of seasonal dry ice frost on these dunes. It is summer when this picture was taken, so there is relatively little visible frost, though the bright blue areas in the color strip could possibly be the last remnants from winter. In winter, data suggests the entire surface of these dunes is covered by dry ice frost.

As the location is at 54 degrees south latitude, it likely sits at the northernmost edge of the southern dry ice mantle that in winter covers each of the Martian poles, down to about 60 degrees latitude.

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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 16, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The science team labels these strange features “ring-mound landforms,” a term that has been used to describe [pdf] only vaguely similar features previously found in the Athabasca flood lava plain almost on the other side of Mars. That paper suggested that those ring mounds formed on the “thin, brittle crust of an active fluid flow” created by an explosive event. Since Athabasca is considered Mars’s most recent major flood lava event, the fluid was likely lava, which on Mars flows more quickly and thinly in the lower gravity.

Thus, in Athabasca the ring-mounds formed when a pimple of molten lava from below popped the surface.

But what about the ring mounds in the picture to the right?
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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 19, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled merely as a “terrain sample,” it was likely snapped not for any specific research project, but to fill a gap in the camera schedule in order to maintain its proper temperature.

When the science team does this they try to pick interesting locations. Sometimes the picture is relatively boring. Sometimes, like the picture to the right, it reveals weird geology that is somewhat difficult to explain. The picture covers the transition from the smooth featureless plain to the north, and the twisting and complex ridges to the south, all of which are less than a few feet high.

Note the gaps. The downgrade here is to the west, and the gaps appear to vaguely indicate places where flows had occurred.
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Today’s cool image returns to the same region yesterday’s cool image visited. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 21, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It was clearly taken to get a close look at this unusual pointy mesa.

MRO elevation data says this mesa is about 800 feet height. The color difference between the north and south flanks suggests the accumulated presence of dust on the north, suggesting the prevailing winds here come from the northeast and blow to the southwest. This conclusion is reinforced by the dark accumulated dust found in the southwest quadrants of all the crater floors in the full image. The wind blows this dust into the craters, where it gets trapped against the southwest crater wall.

Note the mesa’s wide base, with one crater partly eaten away on its eastern edge. The overall shape of this base suggests that it was carved by some flow coming from the southwest, as indicated by the arrow.
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Since the first comprehensive orbital data of Mars was sent back in the early 1970s by Mariner 9, scientists have generally concluded that many of the features seen at the eastern end of the giant Valles Marineris canyon were caused by one or several catastrophic floods.

The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here and taken on July 26, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), provides a good example of why the scientists have come to that conclusion. It shows what the camera team labels a “streamline feature surrounding crater.” I have added the arrows to indicate the presumed direction of flow. The flow went around this 2.5-mile-wide unnamed crater because the impact had compacted it, making it resistent to erosion. The flow however was strong and large enough to wash away the plateau on which the crater sits, as well as cutting into the crater’s southwest rim. In addition, the rim on the southeast was also cut through at some point, this time from what might have been flow eddies as the flood pushed past.

Hence, the theory of catastrophic floods.

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Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 23, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). I had originally chosen to feature a different picture of this spot, taken on August 1, 2024 in order to create a stereo pair, but this week the camera team featured this first photo, providing a caption.

This disrupted surface is characterized by a collection of rounded to flat-topped mounds of various sizes connected by narrow flat floors, typical of the aptly named “chaotic terrain” on Mars.

What could have caused this flat surface to break into pieces? You might imagine that a flat surface could be broken up if it was inflated or collapsed. One hypothesis is that large amounts of water were released from deep below the ground to cause the surface break up.

Normally on Mars, especially in the mid-latitudes, chaotic terrain is associated with glacial activity, suggesting that glaciers over time erode valleys along random criss-crossing fault lines to create the mesas and canyons. This patch of chaotic terrain however suggests a different formation process.
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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 21, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled merely as a “terrain sample,” it was likely taken not as part of any specific research project but chosen by the camera team to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule in order to maintain its proper temperature.

When they do this they try to pick a target that is somewhat interesting, though it is not always possible. In this case it appears they succeeded in capturing a location filled with lots of puzzling stuff, including low 60-to-80-foot-high mesas with either flat- or hollow-tops, shallow craters that appear almost buried, and other craters that appear so deep and shadowed that it is even possible these are skylights into underground caves.

In between these features the flat landscape has a scattering of ripple dunes, all oriented in the same direction and thus implying that the prevailing winds are or were blowing from the northeast to the southwest.
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Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 3, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels the photo as capturing a “contact near Reull Vallis,” a 1,000-mile-long Martian canyon that flows down the eastern slopes of Hellas Basin, the death valley of Mars.

What I see isn’t a geological contact but a complex jumble of odd-shaped depressions and mesas, surrounded by an eroded surface that seems squashed and deformed by some process. If this is all we had to go on, I would simply label this as another “What the heck?” image on Mars and move on. However, the larger context of the overview map helps explain it all, at least as best as we can explain using orbital data.
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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, sharpened, and annotated to post here, was taken on July 1, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this “Contacts between Likely Sulfates and Chaos Blocks.” That contact I have indicated with the dotted line. To the west the lighter terrain is likely the sulfate-bearing unit, similar to the sulfate-bearing unit that Curiosity has been traversing on Mount Sharp for the past year or so.

To the east are the chaos blocks, but I think that description is wholly inadequate. In truth, I haven’t the faintest idea how this terrain got to be the way it is. It is evident that a lot of dust and sand has gotten trapped in the hollows, leaving behind ripple dunes in some places, but why the higher ridges swirl and curve about as they do is utterly baffling.
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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on June 29, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The scientists label the picture simply as “gully monitoring,” with an apparent goal of looking to see if this gully has changed since MRO took the first high resolution image two years previously. In the interim this terrain went from Martian spring, through summer and winter, and has now returned to spring.

As far as I can tell, no changes are visible, but then I am not using the highest resolution data available. Small changes might be detectable in the highest resolution using good detection software. Overall, the gully drops about 3,000 feet.

The white dot in the overview map above marks the location, on the southwest interior rim of an unnamed 30-mile wide crater. This region in the Martian cratered highlands was featured in a four part cool image series I did back 2023 (here, here, here, and here), with this as my conclusion:

Overall, our short survey of the southern cratered highlands suggests that the glacial material and ice found in the southern mid-latitudes affects the Martian surface differently than in the northern lowland plains. In the north the craters and the surrounding terrain often appear blobby, as if the ice is close to the surface and also a dominant component of the ground. Impacts therefore cause significant soft melt features, with craters often heavily distorted. Similarly, there is evidence of the existence of past mud volcanoes that once spewed water and mud from below ground.

In the south however the surface is at a higher elevation, and it appears the ice layer is deeper underground. Thus, it appears the ground is more firm, and the only obvious evidence of an underground layer of ice is revealed when sublimation and the subsequent erosion produce these large pits inside craters.

In the case of this crater, a small impact on its interior southwest slope apparently caused that underground layer of ice to melt temporarily and flow downhill, leaving behind the gully and flow features we see today. Based on the two MRO pictures taken a full Martian year apart, it appears the feature is generally stable and thus likely old, left over from that impact. If things are changing seasonally they are doing so in small amounts and slowly.

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Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 19, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a 2,500 to 3,000-foot-high mesa with what the scientists call “bedrock layers”, most obvious as the lower terraces on the mesa’s western slopes.

What makes this mesa especially interesting is its overall shape. It appears as if something has taken a bite out of it, resulting in that bowl-like hollow on the mesa’s southern half.

Was this caused by an impact? Or has some other long term Martian processes caused it?

This mesa is just one of many mesas in a region of chaos terrain dubbed Hydraotes Chaos. Such chaos terrain is thought to form when erosion processes, possibly glacial in nature, that carve out canyons along faultlines, leaving behind mesas with randomly oriented canyons cutting in many directions.
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Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on April 21, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

My first reaction on seeing this picture was to scratch my head? What am I looking at? Are those fluted dark features going downhill to the south, or uphill to the north? What are they? Are they slope streaks? Avalanches? How do they relate to the flat-topped ground in the middle of the picture?

I have made it easier for my readers to interpret the picture by adding the “low” and “high” markers. We are looking at two parallel thin mesas about 1,400 feet high, with the saddle between them only dropping about 350 feet.

But what about the dark fluted features? To understand what these are requires more information.
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