Tag: geology

New study using Chandrayaan-2 data again suggests ice in crater near Moon’s south pole

9:06 am

The Moon's south pole region

The uncertainty of science: A new study by scientists in India using data from the Indian lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-2 has once again found evidence strongly suggesting the existence of water ice in several permanently shadowed craters near Moon’s south pole.

The findings are based on observations made by the Chandrayaan-2 orbiter’s Dual Frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar (DFSAR), a sophisticated microwave imaging instrument capable of probing beneath the lunar surface.

Among the craters examined, scientists found particularly strong evidence of subsurface ice in a 1.1-kilometre-wide crater located within the larger Faustini crater near the Moon’s south pole. Researchers said the crater displayed a distinctive “lobate-rim morphology”- a flow-like structural pattern that may indicate the impact event penetrated an ice-rich subsurface layer.

On the map above the green dot to the right of the south pole marks the location of the small crater inside Faustini Crater. Their conclusions were based first on microwave data suggesting subsurface ice, and second on the lobate shape of this crater’s rim, which has a kind blobby look implying the material is muddy and impregnated with ice.

Increasingly the data from all sources seems to suggest that if there is ice in these permanently shadowed craters, it is likely impregnated in the soil, and will require processing to extract.

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Colorful Martian dunes

12:00 pm

Colorful Martian dunes
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on March 15, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels the image a “dune field.” What struck me immediately however was the vast range of colors, something that is usually not seen on Mars. Within a very short distance we go from bright orange to dark blue, with the change sometimes exceedingly sharp.

The orange is likely coarser rocks or bedrock, while the dark blue patches are likely piles of sand that has piled up due to prevailing winds. Why the dunes on the upper plateau change from bright orange to dark blue however is an unknown.

And why the patches of dust remain undefined is also a mystery. Dust on Mars is generally organized into dunes by the wind. It isn’t here.
» Read more

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An outcrop of many parallel layers on Mars

1:52 pm

An outcrop of many parallel layers on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on March 11, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The picture has been rotated so that north is to the top.

The science team describes this feature as “dark linear ridges.” Apparently the ground at this location at some point in the past tilted upward, exposing these layers and creating this 250 to 400 foot high escarpment facing south. What makes this even more intriguing is the ground was only uplifted in this one area. If you look at the full image you will see that the surrounding terrain is flat and relatively featureless.

The location is in the high southern latitudes in the Martian cratered highlands. Thus, it is likely that there is some near surface ice in these layers, and in fact the many Martian climate cycles produced by the wide swings in the planet’s rotational tilt likely contributed to making the layers themselves.
» Read more

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A Martian wormlike dune field on the floor of a triple crater

12:35 pm

Overview map

A Martian wormlike dune field on the floor of a triple crater
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on March 18, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this simply as a “dune field.” The overview map above marks the location, in a large dune field that fills most of the floor of an unnamed 16-mile wide crater that is actually part of the triple impact. If you look at the inset, you can see that there are three craters here, the first the largest with a width of about 27 miles, the second about 18 miles wide that lies on top to the southwest, and the third 16-mile-wide crater arriving last slightly more to the southwest.

What likely happened to cause this triple impact is that the bolide likely broke up as it cut through Mars’ thin atmosphere, producing three pieces that hit bam-bam-bam right after each other.

The wormlike dune field illustrates the dusty nature of Mars. Over the eons the red planet’s copious amounts of volcanic ash was blown into these three craters and got trapped there, with the prevailing winds forcing the dust to pile up to the southwest. The physics of wind, sand, and dune fields resulted in these parallel dune ridges.

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Frost on Mars

11:33 am

Frost on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on March 23, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

It shows the eastern interior rim of a 4.5-mile-wide crater, and was taken to find out if there has been any change to the gullies flowing down that 800 foot slope since the last high resolution image was taken in 2020.

Both pictures were taken in the spring, and both pictures not only don’t appear to show much change, both show the same white frost in exactly the same places. As no pictures have been taken at other times in the year, we do not know yet if this frost disappears as expected in summer.

In fact, until such images are taken and prove this white material disappears in the summer, we don’t even know for sure if it is indeed frost. We could instead be looking a some unusual form of white bedrock, though in my review of many MRO pictures such things are quite rare.
» Read more

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Scientists: Europa’s theorized plumes of water vapor might simply be statistical noise

8:56 am

Europa in true color
Europa in true color, taken by Juno September 2022.
Click for full image.

The uncertainty of science: Based on a re-analysis of data from the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists now say that the plumes of water vapor that Hubble had supposedly detected erupting from the surface of the Jupiter moon Europa might not exist, and could instead simply be statistical noise in the data.

The new paper looks at the last 14 years of data from the Hubble Space Telescope’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (HST/STIS) focused on Europa’s Lyman-alpha emissions. Lyman-alpha is a specific wavelength of ultraviolet light emitted and scattered by hydrogen atoms. From 2012-2014, the team was pushing the limits of the Hubble telescope’s capabilities.

“One of the difficulties in interpreting the data back then was determining where to place Europa within its context,” Retherford said. “The way Hubble works left some uncertainty in terms of placement relative to the center of the image. If Europa’s placement was off even just by a pixel or two, it could affect how the data gets interpreted.”

As a result, what they thought could be evidence of a water vapor plume could also just be statistical noise. “Our reanalysis took our original 99.9% confidence in the plumes’ existence and reduced it to less than 90% confidence,” said Dr. Lorenz Roth (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden), the paper’s lead author. “That’s simply not enough evidence to support the certainty of claims we made at the time.”

The plumes might still exist, but the data used here is simply more uncertain that previously thought. It is hoped that when Europa Clipper and Juice both enter Jupiter orbit in a few years they will be able to settle this issue more definitively.

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The weird tilted layers on the floor of Danielson Crater on Mars

1:00 pm

Tilted layers inside Danielson Crater
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image to the right returns us to a previous cool image from 2022. Then I called this strange terrain visible on the floor of the 41-mile-wide Danielson Crater “freaky badlands,” because of the innumerable layers that are all tilted and appear eroded in the same way by prevailing winds coming from the northeast.

Today’s image shows more of the same. The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on March 26, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It not only shows these layers, in the full image (which I strongly suggest you look at), it also shows several terraced mesas with the same tilt, each looking almost like wedding cakes that have slumped sideways. The aquamarine colors in the hollows suggest finer-grained dust, while the orange colors on higher terrain suggest coarser materials and bedrock.

As I noted in 2022:
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The barren hills west of Jezero Crater

10:56 am

The barren Martian hills west of Jezero Crater
Click for full panorama.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above, cropped and reduced to post here, was created on April 5, 2026 using 46 pictures taken by one of the high resolution camera’s on the Mars rover Perseverance. It also attempts to show this terrain in natural color.

The blue dot on the overview map to the right marks Perseverance’s present location. The green dot indicates where I think the rover was when the panorama was taken. (Note: I think the press release incorrectly lists the Sol number for these dates, but as I am not sure I can only guess.) The yellow lines indicate approximately the terrain seen in the full panorama.

As the press release notes, “the panorama offers one of the richest geological vistas of the rover’s mission, revealing a windswept landscape of diverse rock textures.” It also appears this is the direction the rover is presently headed.

I ask my readers to once again look at this panorama. It shows an utterly barren terrain. There is no life here, and if there ever was it was gone billions of years ago and never did much to shape the landscape. While some at NASA and in the planetary community like to tout the possibility of life on Mars in order to lobby for funding, the reality we see says there is none, and that life will only appear on Mars when humans finally arrive there to build new human societies.

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Brain terrain on Mars?

11:00 am

Brain terrain on Mars?
Click for original picture. For full image go here.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and expanded to post here, was taken on April 2, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled simply as a “terrain sample”, such images are usually taken not as part of any specific research project, but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule. The camera team needs to take pictures at a regular cadence to maintain its proper temperature.

When they have such a gap, they try to find interesting things to photograph, and usually succeed. In this case we are looking at what I think the scientists dub “brain terrain,” a feature unique to Mars that is thought related to near surface ice and its sublimation, though at present the origins of brain terrain remain murky. The scale is approximately 100 meters across the width of this picture.

However, the location of this brain terrain makes any conclusions about its origin difficult.
» Read more

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Corroding glacial features inside Martian crater

11:25 am

Overview map
Glacier country in the Martian northern mid-latitudes.

The corroding glacial floor of a Martian crater
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image gives us another nice example of the ample availability of near surface ice on Mars, even if it might take a bit of processing to extract it from the dust and soil. The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on March 31, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The picture captures in detail most of the floor of a 5.8-mile-wide unnamed crater, located in the northern mid-latitudes of Mars, in a 2000-mile-long strip I like to call glacier country, because practically every image taken there shows extensive glacial features. The white dot on the overview map above shows the location within that strip, with the inset showing the full crater, as well as the surrounding terrain.

The softness of this landscape strongly suggests a topsoil well impregnated with ice. The crater’s rim is itself very soft and subdued, suggesting melting and sublimation over time.

The material in the floor of the crater resembles peeling paint, which in this case suggests the ice there has been sublimating away as well. Nonetheless, there remains a lot under the surface. Future Martian colonists will certainly come to this region to gather ice for their own purposes.

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Curiosity looks closely at the broken slab that had been stuck on its drill bit

12:37 pm

The rock Atacama
Click for original image.

As expected, the science team for the Mars rover hasdecided before moving on it would take a close look at the 28 pound slab of rock that had been stuck on its drill bit and when finally dropped free broken into several pieces when it hit the ground.

The top picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows that entire rock, labeled Atacama by the science team. The two insets below are close-ups of the delicate layering at the rock’s left edge as well as the drill hole itself. From team’s update today:

The highest-priority activities after liberating the drill included imaging the drill with Mastcam and ChemCam RMI, and imaging into the now-empty drill hole with MAHLI (the image above). The science team made the most of the freshly-broken surfaces created when Atacama fell back to Mars, and the freshly-exposed sand once hidden underneath Atacama.

The exposed sand is off camera, to the right. Expect a paper published about that sand, buried likely for millions of years, sometime in the next year or so.

The delicate flutes at the rock’s left edge are somewhat common rock features seen by Curiosity, made possible by Mars’ thin atmosphere and its one-third Earth gravity. On Earth the gravity and weather generally destroys such things. On Mars the lack of violent weather and light gravity allows them to form, and the thin wind even helps in their formation.

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Springtime on the residual icecap of the Martian south pole

11:42 am

Weird hatchwork at the Martian south pole
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and rotated so that north is to the top, was taken on March 28, 2026 by the high resolution camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

It shows what the science team labels a “south polar residual cap site.” The location is about 200 miles from the Martian south pole, well within the south polar ice cap. A second picture of this same spot was taken only a few days later, and was labeled “bright and dark fans on patterned ground.” With the second image the science team added their nickname for this location, “Troy,” which makes referencing it easier.

The hatchwork is the mystery here. In fact, the scientists have been monitoring this geology since 2020 to see if there have been any changes, either long term or seasonally. Almost certainly they have spotted seasonal changes, as indicated by the hatchwork itself and explained below, but I don’t access to the higher resolution images that would show any major modifications on a larger scale.
» Read more

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Juno flies past the Jupiter moon Thebe

11:07 am

Jupiter's moon Thebes
Click for original image.

Though the Jupiter orbiter Juno is in its final orbits as it is running out of fuel, on May 1, 2026 it did a close fly-by of the 50 by 72 mile-wide Jupiter moon Thebe, getting within 3,100 miles.

The picture to the right, cropped and expanded to post here, is the best image released from that fly-by. It is very comparable to a photo taken by the Galileo orbiter on January 4, 2000. Both show the very large crater, dubbed Zethus.

The picture was taken by Juno’s Stellar Reference Unit (SRU) camera, designed not to do science but to “image star fields for navigation.” Thus, the picture is somewhat fuzzy, and was pointed poorly so the moon is on the far right, almost off camera.

It is very unclear how much longer Juno will function. It has apparently survived attempts by the Trump administration to zero out its operating budget, but there have been indications that its fuel supply is low.

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Curiosity unintentionally picks up a rock slab

11:15 am

Sequence showing slab picked up and then dropped
Click for movie. Original images found here, here, here, and here.

In their latest drilling campaign using the drill on the Mars rover Curiosity, the science team picked up a big surprise that could have been a serious problem, but turned out all right in the end. When they tried to extract the drill from the hole, the drill instead stayed stuck to the rock, and picked the whole rock up instead.

The four images to the right show the sequence, sourced from here, here, here, and here.

On April 25, 2026, Curiosity drilled a sample from a rock nicknamed “Atacama,” which is an estimated 1.5 feet in diameter at its base, 6 inches thick and weighs roughly 28.6 pounds (13 kilograms). When the rover retracted its arm, the entire rock lifted out of the ground, suspended by the fixed sleeve that surrounds the rotating drill bit. Drilling has fractured or separated the upper layers of rocks in the past, but a rock has never remained attached to the drill sleeve. The team initially tried vibrating the drill to shake off the rock, but saw no change.

Then, on April 29, they tried reorienting Curiosity’s robotic arm and vibrating the drill again. Imagery in the GIF shows sand falling from Atacama, but the rock stayed attached to the rover.

Finally, on May 1, Curiosity’s team tried again, tilting the drill more, rotating and vibrating the drill, and spinning the drill bit. The team planned to perform these actions multiple times but the rock came off on the first round, fracturing as it hit the ground.

Had they not been able to release the rock it could have seriously impacted the mission, even ended it.

As noted by the science team in their own update today about this situation:

Future activities involve wrapping up the drill campaign on Atacama and, nominally, seeking a more firmly rooted drill target in order to collect drill tailings for analysis, which were lost from Atacama as part of the effort to dislodge the drill bit from the rock.

In other words, they are going to have hunt around for a better drill spot, as they really do want to study some drill samples at this location. They have left the boxwork area and have moved uphill closer to the pure sulfite unit, and want to see how the geology has changed.

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Curiosity looks at a small crater as it climbs Mount Sharp

11:50 am

Antofagasta crater
Click for full resolution. Click here, here, and here for original images.

Cool image time! The panorama above, created from three pictures taken by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity (see here, here, and here), takes a look at a small relatively fresh crater on the slopes of Mount Sharp. From an update from the rover’s science team yesterday:

At the beginning of the week, Curiosity arrived right on target on the rim of the 10-meter (33 feet) “Antofagasta” crater. The crater looked fresh and deep as we had hoped with a nice well-defined rim that didn’t look too eroded, but the bottom of it turned out to be filled with dark rippled sandy material that covered up the most interesting rock layers. There were a few rock exposures just above the sand cover that seemed like they might have been deep enough to have been sheltered from space radiation between the time their sediments were deposited and the crater-forming impact, but reaching them from the rim would have put the rover at such an awkward angle that we wouldn’t have been able to deliver the sample to the instruments.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

It’s possible that we might have been able to get into a better position by instead placing the rover on the rippled crater fill, but the chance that the rover could get stuck in all that sand made it much too high a risk. We also looked at the nearby blocks in case they could have been ejecta from the crater, but since all the rocks visible in the crater wall looked very similar to each other, there wasn’t a good way to tell which ejecta blocks might have come from the deeper layers of the crater. Because of this, the team decided against attempting to drill in or around the crater.

The overview map to the right provides the context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s location when the pictures above were taken. The yellow lines roughly indicate the area covered by the panorama. The red dotted line marks the future planned route, the white dotted line the rover’s actual travels.

Note the flat rocks in the foreground of the panorama, all part of the crater’s rim. Each looks like a large flat paving stone that was very precisely shattered into numerous tiny pieces, all about the same size. Very strange. On Earth you’d assume some craftsman had laid these small pieces down like tiles, but of course, that couldn’t have happened on Mars.

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The movement of surface ash on Mars over a half century

12:08 pm

Viking and Mars Express images side-by-side for comparison
Go here and here for original images.

Overview map

Cool image time! In comparing images of one location on Mars taken a half century apart, scientists using Europe’s Mars Express orbiter have discovered that the dark ash covering this region has shifted south by about 200 miles.

The two images above show the change, with a Viking orbiter image taken sometime in 1976 on the left and the Mars Express image taken in 2026 on the right. Both images have been enhanced to match each other, with the white box marking an area seen in close-up by Mars Express.

The overview map to the right provides the context. This region is inside Utopia Basin, one of the largest ancient impact basins on Mars, thought to have been formed by an impact that occurred a little more than four billion years ago. Much of Mars’ dark volcanic dust is thought to come from the Medusae Fossae Formation, a gigantic volcanic ash field the size of India and located on the other side of the planet, in between all of the red planet’s largest volcanoes. Over the eons that ash has gotten distributed across the globe.

In this case, it not only covers large areas of Utopia Basin, but over a half century the prevailing winds in the thin Martian atmosphere has been enough to shift the edge of this particular ash field south by 200 miles.

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Martian mountains on Mount Sharp

11:45 am

Panorama looking up Mount Sharp
Click for larger full resolution image. For original images go here and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above was created using two pictures taken by the high resolution camera on the rover Curiosity on Mars (here and here).

The overview map to the right gives the context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s position on the day before these pictures were taken, climbing through the foothills on the flanks of Mount Sharp. I do not know if it traveled again before taking these two pictures above. The white dotted line its past travels, while the red dotted line its planned future route. At present Curiosity has climbed about 3,500 feet up the mountain. It is still about 15,000 feet below the peak, which is about 25 miles away and not visible from here.

The yellow lines indicate where I think the panorama is looking, though I admit that I am not sure. The view is distant, since this is high resolution camera. This panorama might actually be looking in a completely different direction, downhill at one of the hills that Curiosity previously drove past. The air is very dusty, which means if the rim of Gale Crater is in the background, 20-30 miles away, we can’t see it.

Regardless, the science team has finally finished its many nine-month-long survey of the boxwork geology, and has sent Curiosity climbing again. I think these pictures are part of their review of the future terrain, as they plan the rover’s route through the lighter-colored sulfate terrain higher on the mountain. If instead they are looking downhill, they were taken both to review previously viewed geology as well as to measure the dustiness of the atmosphere.

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Feathery eroding layers on Mars

11:01 am

Feathery layers on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on February 23, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the science team calls “layers exposed around [a] streamlined feature”.

The elevation difference between the mesa top on the left and the canyon floor on the right is about 1,000 feet. The layers are the terraces stepping downward along that drop.

What makes these layers interesting is how they have been exposed. The material that makes up the layers appears very sandy and delicate, so it breaks away it very small pieces, just like sand on a beach. The result is this feathery look. If you look close you can see that some small craters have been partly obliterated by that erosion, with their existence only marked by their remaining rim, on the high side.
» Read more

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Cracked bedrock on Mars?

2:01 pm

Cracked Martian landscape
Click for full image.

For today’s cool image we return to Mars. The picture to the right, cropped and brightened to post here, was taken on December 3, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The focus of the picture was a strange crater in the floor of Mawrth Vallis, a channel that drains northward from Mars’ cratered southern highlands to its northern lowland plains. You can see the crater in the full image if you click on the picture. It is intriguing because its rim is strangely abrupt and flat on all sides, something that is not seen with impact craters, which have a raised rim of material plowed out by the impact.

In the picture to the right I have however focused on the two small 50-70-foot-high mesas and cracked ground that surrounds them. What struck me was the dry appearance of this landscape. Located at 23 degrees north latitude, it is in the dry tropics of Mars, where little near surface ice is found. The cracks emphasize this conclusion, as they so well resemble the cracks you see in dried mud on Earth.
» Read more

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Proteus, Neptune’s second largest moon, discovered by Voyager-2 in 1989

3:02 pm

Proteus, Neptune's second largest moon
For original images go here and here.

Our tour continues of the only close visit to Neptune on August 25, 1989 by Voyager-2. The two pictures to the right were taken by the spacecraft during that fly-by of Neptune’s second largest moon, dubbed Proteus. Both pictures are shown as Voyager-2 took them.

The top picture was taken from a distance of about 540,000 miles, and has a resolution of about five miles per pixel.

The satellite has an average radius of about 120 miles and is uniformly dark with an albedo of about 6 percent. The irregular shape suggests that 1989N1 has been cold and rigid throughout its history and subject to significant impact cratering.

The bottom picture was taken from a distance of about 91,000 miles, and can resolve objects as small as 1.7 miles in size.

Hints of crater-like forms and groove-like lineations can be discerned. The apparent graininess of the image is caused by the short exposure necessary to avoid significant smear.

Proteus was not known prior to Voyager-2’s fly-by, because it orbits so close to Neptune (about 73,000 miles) that the ground-based telescopes of the time could not see it in the glare of the gas giant. It was discovered in early global pictures of Neptune as Voyager-2 approached.

While planetary scientists have made some educated guesses about the moon’s origin and geology based on these two images, they are simply guesses. These are the only detailed images we have of Proteus, and neither is particularly good.

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