Tag: geology

Update on Perseverance’s future travel plans

10:47 am

Perseverance's future travels
Click for full image.

The science team for the rover Perseverance yesterday released a revised map of where they intend over the next few months to send the rover on the floor of Jezero Crater.

The map to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows that route.

The first science campaign (depicted with yellow hash marks) begins with the rover performing an arching drive southward from its landing site to Séítah-North (Séítah-N). At that point the rover will travel west a short distance to an overlook where it can view much of the Séítah unit. The “Séítah-N Overlook” could also become an area of scientific interest – with Perseverance performing a “toe dip” into the unit to collect remote-sensing measurements of geologic targets.

Once its time at the Séítah-N Overlook is complete, Perseverance will head east, then south toward a spot where the science team can study the Crater Floor Fractured Rough in greater detail. The first core sample collected by the mission will also take place at this location. After Cratered Floor Fractured Rough, the Perseverance rover team will evaluate whether additional exploration (depicted with light-yellow hash marks) farther south – and then west – is warranted.

Whether Perseverance travels beyond the Cratered Floor Fractured Rough during this first science campaign, the rover will eventually retrace its steps. As Perseverance passes the Octavia B. Butler landing site, the first science campaign will conclude. At that point, several months of travel lay ahead as Perseverance makes its way to “Three Forks,” where the second science campaign will begin.

At that point the rover will begin studying the base of the delta of material that in the far past poured through a gap in the western rim of Jezero Crater.

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Evidence of past underground water in the Martian equatorial regions?

2:30 pm

Mosaic of strange feature
Click here, here, here, and here for full images.

Today’s cool image, to the right, takes us to the equatorial regions of Mars, a region that today appears quite arid and dry based on all the orbital and rover/lander data so far gathered. The photo and its complex geology however provides us a hint that once liquid water did exist here. At least, that is the hypothesis that scientists presently favor, though making it fit this complex geology is not simple or straightforward.

The mosaic to the right is made from four context camera images taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a very complicated series of depressions — one of which vaguely resembles a crater — that appear to have been washed out by some past erosion process, though that process could not have been that simple because of the fissures and cracks that dominate the floor of the circular feature.

I contacted Chris Okubo of the U.S. Geological Survey, who had requested a high resolution image from MRO of a small part of this mosaic, as indicated by the white box, to ask him what we are looking at. His answer was appropriately noncommittal:
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Ingenuity completes 7th flight on Mars

10:21 pm

Locations of Perseverance and Ingenuity on Mars
Click for interactive map.

Ingenuity yesterday successfully completed its 7th flight on Mars, heading south and landing exactly as planned.

Ingenuity lifted off around 12:34 local mean solar time on Tuesday, which corresponds to 11:54 a.m. EDT (1554 GMT). As planned, the chopper then traveled 348 feet (106 meters) south from its previous location on the floor of Mars’ Jezero Crater, staying aloft for nearly 63 seconds, JPL officials wrote in another tweet. The solar-powered rotorcraft set down at a new airfield, the fourth one it has reached since landing on the Red Planet with NASA’s Perseverance rover on Feb. 18.

Both the rover Perseverance and Ingenuity are traveling south on the floor of Jezero Crater, with the helicopter leapfrogging ahead every few weeks. On the map the red dot indicates Perseverance location, with the green dots Ingenuity’s last three landing sites. They have not yet added to the map exactly where Ingenuity landed yesterday (#7), so I have estimated it based on the information above.

The red outline indicates the region they are planning to explore over the next few months in order to gather a very thorough understanding of the geology of the floor of Jezero Crater. They will eventually head to the northwest towards the cliffs in the upper left, which is the foot of the large delta that flowed in the past into the crater through a gap in its western rim. The route they will take to get there however remains undetermined.

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Eroding Martian lava?

12:49 pm

Eroding Martian lava?
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on April 19, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Requested by Colin Dundas of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Science Center in Arizona, the image was entitled “Enigmatic Terrain in Elysium Planitia.” The image is labeled so because, as Dundas explained,

Flood lava is a key part of the feature, best seen at the north and south ends of the image. What’s unusual is the knobby terrain at the center. … I haven’t yet been able to do a more thorough study of these features, so plenty of puzzles remain!

The higher material in the upper right is likely flood lava. A 2016 paper [pdf] led by Dundas on similar features in Elysium Planitia that were not as knobby found their origin somewhat baffling. The evidence suggested that lava, mud, wind, and ice could all be involved in their formation, but the evidence was also not sufficient to eliminate any possibility.

In the case of today’s image, the explanation might also be any of these possibilities. For example, we might be looking at the erosion of the flood lava, exposing harder knobs of different material that had been there before and had been covered by the lava. Or maybe the knobs are simply the last bits of that layer of flood lava that has not yet eroded away.

As always, the overview map provides some context.
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Mini-volcanoes (mud or lava?) near Zhurong’s Mars landing site

2:11 pm

Mosaic of features near Zhurong's planned landing site on Mars
Click here, here, and here for full images.

Cool image time! Though we still do not know exactly where the Chinese Mars rover Zhurong landed on Mars, we have a rough idea based on the latitude and longitude numbers leaked to the Chinese press in October 2020 and were apparently confirmed by photos taken by the Tianwen-1 orbiter soon after reaching Mars. We also know Zhurong’s engineers wanted to land in the northern lowland plains dubbed Utopia Planitia, a region that is relatively flat and thus makes a safe landing spot for their first attempt to reach the surface of Mars.

The mosaic to the right, rotated and reduced to post here, is made from three context camera images taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The white cross on the right edge is essentially Zhurong’s leaked landing spot. The red box indicates the area covered by one of only two photos that China has released that were taken by its Tianwen-1 orbiter.

The white box in the upper left shows the area covered by today’s cool image, shown below.
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NASA picks two missions to fly to Venus later this decade

2:14 pm

NASA today announced two new missions to go to Venus to study its atmosphere and surface, both scheduled to launch sometime between 2028 and 2030.

One, dubbed DAVINCI+, send a probe into Venus’s atmosphere, both to measure its gases as well as taken the first high resolution images of a unique Venusian geological called “tesserae.” On radar images tesserae regions appear to be high plateaus cross-cut with many sharp ridges.

The second, dubbed VERITAS, will be a radar-orbiter designed to map the planet’s surface at higher resolution than the earlier Pioneer and Magellan radar orbiters. It will also do this:

VERITAS also will map infrared emissions from Venus’ surface to map its rock type, which is largely unknown, and determine whether active volcanoes are releasing water vapor into the atmosphere.

That data will help tell us whether there are now active volcanoes on Venus. The data we presently have suggest it is a planet of many volcanoes, numbering in the millions. That data has also hinted at the possibility that some are active. VERITAS will attempt to find out.

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Inexplicable ridges north of China’s Mars rover

2:00 pm

Wrinkle ridges in Utopia Planitia?
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, shows some unusual geology about 450 miles north of the approximate area where China’s Zhurong rover landed in the northern lowlands of Mars. It was taken on April 14, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

These scattered ridges remind me of wrinkle ridges, formed when the surface of a place shrinks. With less surface area, the extra material needs somewhere to go, and so ridges are forced up at weak points to release the pressure.

Assuming this hand-waving explanation is true, the next question would be: What causes the shrinking? The overview map below might help provide an answer.
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A visit to a crater near the non-face on Mars

1:03 pm

Glacial erosion features inside crater
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on March 12, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It looks down at small six-mile-wide Apt crater in the northern lowland plains of Mars located at about 40 degrees north latitude. The image’s focus were the layers on the crater interior rim as well as the eroded glacial features on the crater’s floor. The color strip suggests [pdf] that the bluish material on the north-facing south interior rim and floor are likely icy, while the tan-colored material seen in the crater’s north half are likely dusty.

While the suggestion of glacial material on the crater’s interior is very typical for many craters in the mid-latitudes, what makes this crater of interest is its location, only a short few miles south of that mesa on Mars that for decades the shallow-minded insisted was a face and proof of an alien Martian civilization.
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The strange flows in Shalbatana Vallis on Mars

1:47 pm

Strange flows in Shalbaltana Vallis
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on March 31, 2021, and shows a series of very distinct arrowhead-shaped sloping ridges interspersed with hollows flowing down from the southern cliff face of Shalbatana Vallis, one of the larger long meandering drainages flowing into the northern lowlands of Chryse Planitia and north of Valles Marineris.

This location is at 5 degrees north latitude, so nothing we see in the picture is likely glacial or evidence of ice.

So what are we looking at? My guess is that the parallel ridges show us a hint of the original slope of alluvial fill. In the past canyon’s south rim or cliff either did not exist, or was much smaller. Instead the ground mostly sloped gently downhill from the plateau to the canyon floor.

Scientists believe that in the far past catastrophic floods of water flowed through Shalbatana. If a massive flood of water off that rim came down that slope of alluvial fill, it could have pushed into that fill and created the hollows, washing the fill down into the canyon floor and leaving behind the ridges in between.

The overview maps below provide the geographical context.
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Yutu-2 data suggests Moon’s far side is “bombarded more frequently” than the near side

2:55 pm

The uncertainty of science: According to a new paper, based on ground-penetrating radar data obtained by China’s Yutu-2 rover on the far side of the Moon, scientists now think that the Moon’s more heavily cratered far side is that way because it actually gets bombarded more frequently than the near side.

From the paper’s abstract:

The Lunar Penetrating Radar (LPR) onboard Yutu-2 can transmit electromagnetic pulses to detect the lunar subsurface structure and properties of the regolith. The relative permittivity, loss tangent and TiO2+FeO content of lunar regolith materials at landing site are constrained with LPR data in this paper. The results indicate that the farside may be bombarded more frequently, leading to different regolith accumulation rates on the lunar nearside vs. farside. [emphasis mine]

The data was accumulated during the rover’s first five months on the surface, during those five lunar days. It found that the regolith at the landing site was about 39 feet thick, much thicker than found at the landing site for Yutu-1 on the Moon’s near side. The difference was partly expected because of the nature of the different locations, but combined with other factors the scientists concluded that a higher bombardment rate on the far side would also help explain the difference.

To put it mildly, this conclusion is uncertain. We only have one data point on the far side, and only a few more on the near side. At the same time, the conclusion is somewhat an example of science discovering the obvious. The very first images of the Moon’s far side, taken The Soviet Union’s Luna 3 lunar probe in 1959, showed the surface much more heavily cratered than the near side, with far less areas of smooth mare. Numerous mapping missions since have confirmed that impression.

And it is also intuitive to come to this conclusion. The near side always faces the Earth, which likely acts to intercept many of the type of meteorite hits that reach the Moon’s far side.

This conclusion however is still intuitive, and an honest scientist will not trust it. That this result from Yutu-2 appears to confirms it is therefore nice.

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Glacial flows covering a crater on Mars?

1:43 pm

Partially covered crater by glacial flows?

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on March 4, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows an eroded mound that appears to have flows coming off its north and south slopes that fill the surrounding low spots, including half-covering a nearby crater.

The science team for MRO’s high resolution camera chose this picture as their April 28th picture of the day, noting the following:

The objective of this observation is to examine a crater which seems to be in the process of getting covered by flow from a mound. This image, in Protonilus Mensae, may show us characteristics of the covering material: could it be debris-covered glaciers?

Below is a global map of Mars, with this mound’s location in Protonilus Mensae in the northern mid-latitudes indicated by a black cross.
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The big cliffs of Gediz Vallis on Mars

11:33 am

The Big Cliffs of Mt Sharp
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 21, 2021 by Curiosity’s chemistry camera (ChemCam), normally designed to look at high resolution close-up imagery of nearby objects.

However, it can also be used as what the science team call “a long distance spyglass.” The image to the right is an example, looking at what I think are the distant but steadily approaching big cliffs on the western wall of the canyon Gediz Vallis. Make sure you look close at the shadowed cliff-face, probably several hundred feet high. It is filled with huge rock faces reminiscent of the most stark rock cliffs on the mountains of Earth.

The two images below provide the context, which makes the image even more quite breath-taking.
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The steep sudden foothill of Olympus Mons

2:27 pm

Olympus Mons on Mars

Today’s cool image starts from afar and zooms inward. The elevation map to the right shows Olympus Mons, the largest volcano on Mars and in fact the entire solar system. About 600 miles across, from the edge to its peak this volcano rises about 54,000 feet, with an actual height relative to Mars’ “sea level” of just under 70,000 feet, more than twice as high as Mount Everest on Earth.

The cross-section of this volcano is so large it would cover almost all of France if placed on Earth. As a shield volcano, it was formed by many many volcano flows that laid down many layers of lava, with some in its northwest quadrant thought to be as recent as 2 to 115 million years ago.

Our cool image today is located at the white rectangle at the southeast edge of this volcano, and illustrates how those many lava flows could create such a large shield volcano with such a large cross section.
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Ingenuity to make sixth flight next week

9:17 am

Future travels for Perseverance and Ingenuity

The Ingenuity engineering team announced today that the Mars helicopter will make its sixth flight next week, flying to a new landing spot while taking images for the Perseverance science team.

Ingenuity’s flight plan begins with the helicopter ascending to 33 feet (10 meters), then heading southwest for about 492 feet (150 meters). When it achieves that distance, the rotorcraft will begin acquiring color imagery of an area of interest as it translates to the south about 50-66 feet (15-20 meters). Stereo imagery of the sand ripples and outcrops of bright rocks at the site will help demonstrate the value of an aerial perspective for future missions. After completing its image collection, Ingenuity will fly about 164 feet (50 meters) northeast where it will touch down at its new base of operations (known as “Field C”).

The flight will attempt a new speed record of 9 mph, and will also land for the first time in a spot that the helicopter has not scouted beforehand. It will instead be using data from high resolution images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) combined with its own hazard avoidance system.

Ingenuity will essentially place itself over and in an area where Perseverance plans to go, leapfrogging ahead flight by flight, as shown by the map above (annotated by me from the map available here). The green dot numbered 5 shows the helicopter’s present position, while #6 shows its approximate landing spot after its sixth flight. Perseverance, whose present location is indicated by the blue marker, is generally heading south within the area outlined by the red line, as described during the science team’s an April 30th press conference. The goal in exploring this region is to gain a very robust geological baseline of the floor of Jezero Crater, which scientists believe will be the oldest material the rover should see in its travels.

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Typical but still mysterious gullies in a crater on Mars

1:40 pm

Gullies on crater interior wall

Today’s cool image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, is of a crater in the mid-latitudes of Mars’s cratered southern highlands. The picture was taken on January 4, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and is actually the only high resolution image ever taken of this crater.

The gullies in the north interior wall of this crater are the reason why this picture was snapped. These gullies are very typical on the pole-facing slopes of mid-latitude Martian craters, and have puzzled scientists since they were first discovered in the late 1990s in images taken by Mars Global Surveyor. Since then, thousands have been found, almost all of which in the 30 to 60 degree mid-latitude bands where glacial features are also found. Most occur on the more shadowed pole-facing interior slopes of the craters, though at higher latitudes they are also found facing the equator.

Since their discovery scientists have puzzled over their cause, which because of their locations favoring colder temperatures suggest some form of seasonal weather factor. The most preferred hypotheses propose some interaction with water ice or dry ice, or are simply dry flows of rocky granular material. None of these hypotheses have been confirmed. Some evidence suggests they are dry flows, no water involved. Other evidence points to the influence of an underground layer of water ice.

The mystery of these gullies is enhanced by by the wider view from MRO’s context camera below, rotated and cropped to post here.
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Martian mesas made entirely of dry ice!

1:27 pm

Dry ice mesas on Mars
Click for full image.

Time for an especially cool image! The photo to the right, taken on February 13, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and cropped and reduced to post here, shows some mesas on the south polar ice cap of Mars.

What makes those mesas cool (literally and figuratively) is that they are thought to be made up entirely of dry ice, part of the thin but permanent frozen carbon dioxide cap in the south. As explained to me by Shane Byrne of the Lunar and Planetary Lab University of Arizona, who requested this image from MRO,

[These mesas are] unusually thick compared to other dry ice mesas (a common landform in the residual ice cap). I only have the lower resolution laser altimeter data to go off for heights here (we may get a stereo pair next year), but from that it looks like 13 meters thick.

That’s about forty feet high, from base to top. In length, the largest mesa on the left is about a mile long and about 1,500 feet wide, on average. And it is made entirely of dry ice!

The red cross on the map below shows the location of these mesas on the south pole ice cap.
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The flaking and cracked floor of a Martian crater

1:10 pm

The flaking and cracked floor of a Martian crater
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on April 1, 2021 by the high resolution camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the central portion of the floor of an unnamed 5-mile-wide crater in northeast corner of Hellas Basin, the deepest large depression on Mars.

The latitude is 33 degrees south, where many glacier features have been identified, especially inside craters.

In this case, the cracked and flaked surface of this crater floor suggests what geologists call exfoliation, “the breaking off of thin concentric shells, sheets, scales, plates, and so on.” On Earth exfoliation generally refers to an erosion process seen on rock faces, though you can see it on other types of materials.

In this Martian crater we appear to be seeing the exfoliation of different ice layers, sublimating away at different rates as they are exposed to the Sun. The layers probably suggest different periods on Mars when snow was falling here, causing the glaciers to grow. The sublimation we see now suggest periods when this region was warmer and the ice was shrinking. Whether we are in such a period now is not yet determined by scientists.

Either way, the photo suggests at least two such cycles, though if we could drill down into this material we would likely find evidence of many more.

Below the fold is a global map of Mars, showing the location of this crater with a red cross in Hellas. The regions surrounded by white borders are areas where many glacial features have been found.
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Martian glacial run-off?

1:46 pm

Mosaic of glacial runoff
For original images click here and here.

Today’s cool image provides us a glimpse at the carved canyons created when the mid-latitude glaciers on Mars were active in the past and slowly flowing downhill into the section of the northern lowland plains dubbed Acidalia Planitia.

The photo to the right is a mosaic of two images taken by the context camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here. The mosaic shows a region at the very edge of Acidalia Planitia at latitude 43 degrees north.

Below is a close-up of the area in the white box, taken by MRO’s high resolution camera on February 28, 2021, as well as a global map marking the location of this image at the very edge of the glacier country found in the chaos terrain of Deuteronilus Mensae.
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A crater with wings!

1:19 pm

A crater with wings!
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on April 5, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows a particularly unusual crater in the southern mid-latitudes on the eastern edge of Hellas Basin.

This region east of Hellas is where scientists have spotted many features that suggest buried glaciers. The terraced material inside this crater, as well as the splattered material surrounding it on three sides, are examples of such glacial material. You can also see similar glacial features, though less pronounced, inside the crater to the north.

The global map of Mars below marks the general location of this crater by a blue cross.
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The layers of Mars’ north pole icecap

12:30 pm

The layers of Mars' north pole icecap
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on April 1, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the high cliff edge of the Martian north polar ice cap, and was taken as part of the springtime monitoring for the numerous avalanches that fall from the icecap’s steep edge every spring.

This particular cliff is probably about 1,000 feet high. I cannot tell if the image captured any avalanches on the very steep north-facing cliff. What struck me about this image however was the terraced layers so visible on the west-facing scarp. You can clearly count about eleven distinct and thick layers, each forming a wide ledge.

Each layer represents a different climate epoch on Mars when the ice cap was growing, with new snow being deposited.
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A Martian mud volcano

11:10 am

A Martian mud volcano?
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on January 6, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a distinct conelike knob in an area of the northern lowland plains of Mars dubbed Acidalia Mensa.

According to this paper [pdf], this is possibly a mud volcano.

Bright pitted cones are common in the northern plains of Mars and have been documented to occur in numerous locations including Acidalia Planitia. Various interpretations of these features have been
proposed but growing consensus in recent literature has favored mud volcanism as the most likely formation mechanism. Mud volcanoes are provocative targets for exploration because they bring to the surface sedimentary materials otherwise inaccessible by normal surface exploration and can aid in reconstructing the sedimentary history of the northern plains. Also, by sampling fluids and sediments from deep in the Martian crust, mud volcanoes may be among the best places to search for ancient and extant life.

A previous cool image post, “Baby volcanoes on Mars”, showed another example in the same general area of Mars.

Though this conclusion is not yet confirmed, the multi-layered apron that surrounds the cone certainly suggests repeated eruptions of muddy water over time.

Scientists have taken many images of this area and cone using MRO’s context camera. (See this image as and example.) All show a very rough terrain, with cracks, fissures, and many smaller cones and knobs. This particular knob however dominates the landscape as one of the largest features. The aprons around it are darker, and appear to have been overlain on top of the nearby rough ground.

If such cones are mud volcanoes, they represent a geological process that is pretty much unique to Mars. There are some comparable features on Earth, but they are rare and do not match exactly.

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Martian volcanic eruption thought to be only 50,000-210,000 years old

2:52 pm

Overview map

Using Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) images scientists now believe they have located a volcanic eruption on Mars that could have erupted violently as recently as only 50,000 years ago, and is located deep within Mars’ volcano country. The overview map to the right indicates the location of this volcanic with the blue cross. The red dots surrounded by white ovals are distinct quakes that InSight has detected. From their paper’s abstract:

Stratigraphic relationships indicate a relative age younger than the surrounding volcanic plains and the [nearby] Zunil impact crater (~0.1–1 [million years]), with crater counting suggesting that the deposit has an absolute model age of 53 ± 7 to 210 ± 12 [thousand years]. This young age implies that if this deposit is volcanic then the Cerberus Fossae region may not be extinct and that Mars may still be volcanically active. This interpretation is consistent with the identification of seismicity in this region by the [InSight] lander, and has additional implications for astrobiology.

The Cerberus Fossae region is a series of long fissures that scientists think were created when the underground magma pushed up, stretched the surface, and thus caused it to crack. This particular feature suggests that when the ground cracked it sometimes also did so in conjunction with a volcanic eruption.

Below is a zoomed-in context mosaic, taken from figure 1 of the above paper, showing the feature itself and the surrounding terrain.
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Fresh washes on Mars?

1:47 pm

Meandering fresh wash on Mars?
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on January 29, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the science team labels as “Fresh Shallow Valleys”. The section I have focused on shows a particularly interesting meander next to a small crater. The full image shows additional similar channels to the north, with one draining into a larger 3.7 mile wide crater.

The location is in the southern cratered highlands, at about 41 degrees south latitude, where much evidence of buried glacial features are found. That certainly is what we appear to see here. In fact, the wider view afforded by MRO’s context camera reveals many more such channels. That wider view also shows a much larger 18-mile-wide crater just to the north that appears filled with buried ice.

That the scientists label these fresh suggests they think they are relatively young, probably dating from when the most recent cycle of glacial growth probably ended. This would make them about 6 million years ago, based on this paper [pdf] and the second figure from that paper below.
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A river of lava on Mars as long as the Columbia

9:45 am

Lava flow in Kasei Valles
Click for full image.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Mars is strange, Mars is wonderful, but above all, Mars is alien. Today’s cool image illustrates this saying quite nicely.

The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on February 1, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and was simply labeled “Sacra Sulci Lava”. Sacra Sulci is a section of the Kasei Valles canyon that runs from the north rim of Valles Marineris north about 600 miles where it turns east for about 400 miles to drain out into the northern lowlands plains of Mars. Sacra Sulci is the region where that valley narrows and then turns east.

Apparently the flat smoother areas on the east and south on this image that rise about 60 feet above the surrounding terrain and that also seem to flow around mesas and into canyons are believed to be the edge of a massive lava flow that occurred about 150 to 200 million years ago and drained through Kasei Valles, just like water.

What makes this puzzling, however, is that everything I had read previously about Kasei Valles said that it was thought to have been formed from catastrophic floods of water on early Mars, when the planet was warmer and wetter. In fact, I had posted previously about this theory, and included the map below, taken from figure 8 of this paper [pdf], showing part of the process that some scientists believe occurred.
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Fourth flight of Ingenuity set for today; shifting to operational phase

9:05 am

Ingenuity close-up taken by Perseverance April 28th
Ingenuity close-up taken by Perseverance April 28th

Even as the Ingenuity engineering team will attempt a fourth flight of Ingenuity, JPL announced today that they and NASA have decided to now shift to operational flights, attempting to duplicate the kind of scouting missions that such helicopters will do on future rovers.

The second link takes you to the live stream of the press conference. The press release is here.

Essentially, they will send Ingenuity on a series of scouting missions after this fourth flight, extending its 30 day test program another 30 days. Its engineers will be working with the Perseverance science team to go where those scientists want to send it. After the fourth and fifth test flights they will fly Ingenuity only periodically, separated by weeks, and send it to scout places Perseverance can’t reach, and have it land at new sites that Perseverance scouted out as it travels.

They have decided to do this because they want to spend more time in this area on the floor of Jezero Crater, for several reasons. First, they are still testing the rover to get it to full working operations. Second, they want to obtain some samples for future pickup at this location. Third, they want to spend an extensive amount of time exploring the floor up to a mile south of their present location.

Finally, the relatively flat terrain is perfect for testing and actually using the helicopter as a scout.

Though the extension is for 30 days, and though the helicopter was not built for long term survival, there is no reason it cannot continue indefinitely until something finally breaks.

Right now they are awaiting the data from the fourth flight, which will arrive at 1:39 pm (Eastern) and will be used to determine what the fifth flight will do, probably a week from now.

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The crack that splits the giant volcanoes on Mars

2:34 pm

Source of Arsia Mons rille
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Cool image time! In the April download of new images from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) was the photo to the right, taken on February 23, 2021 and cropped and reduced to post here, of what was labeled as “Source Region of Possible Rille on South Flank of Arsia Mons.”

Arsia Mons is the southernmost of the string of three giant volcanoes that sit between Mars’ biggest volcano to the west, Olympus Mons, and Mars’ biggest canyon to the east, Valles Marineris. This depression is on the mountain’s lower southern flank, and likely shows an ancient resurgence point where lava once flowed out from beneath the ground to form a rill meandering to the southwest. Today there is no visible resurgence. The floor of the depression appears to be filled with sand and dust, with the surrounding slopes spotted with scattered boulders.

What makes this particular image more interesting is how, when we take a very wide view, it reveals one of the most dramatic geological features on Mars, the 3,500 mile-long crack that caused these three volcanoes, and is actually not obvious unless you know what to look for.

So we need to zoom out. Let us first begin with a mosaic of three wider MRO context camera images, showing the entire rille and the immediately surrounding terrain.
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Twisted taffy in the basement of Mars

2:53 pm

Taffy on Mars
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Cool image time! The photo to the right, taken on March 7, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and cropped and reduced to post here, shows us an example of one of Mars’ strangest and most puzzling geological features, dubbed banded or “taffy-pull” terrain by scientists.

Taffy-pull terrain has so far only been found within Hellas Basin, Mars’ deepest impact basin and what I like to call the basement of Mars. Because of the lower crater count in this terrain scientists consider it relatively young, no more than 3 billion years old, according to this 2014 paper, which also notes

The apparent sensitivity to local topography and preference for concentrating in localized depressions is compatible with deformation as a viscous fluid.

At the moment what that viscous fluid was remains a matter of debate. Many theories propose that ice and water acting in conjunction with salt caused their formation, similar to salt domes seen on Earth. Other propose that the terrain formed from some kind of volcanic or impact melt process.

Almost all of the taffy terrain on Mars has been found in the deepest parts of Hellas Basin in a curved trough along its western interior, as shown by the light blue areas in the overview map below.
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Martian pit on top of Martian dome

12:55 pm

Dome with pit
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Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on March 7, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and was simply labeled “Pit on Top of Dome in Promethei Terra.”

The cropped section to the right shows one of two such pits visible on the entire image. Promethei Terra is a large 2,000 mile long cratered region due east from Hellas Basin, the deepest large region on Mars.

What caused these pits? The known facts provide clues, but do not really solve the mystery.

First, this image is located in the southern cratered highlands at 45 degrees south latitude. Thus, it is not surprising that it resembles similar terrain in the northern lowlands that suggests an ice layer very close to the surface.
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Study: increase in seasonal Martian streaks after 2018 global dust storm suggests dust not water is their cause

2:37 pm

Map of Mars showing location of new linneae after 2018 global dust storm
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The uncertainty of science: A just-published survey of Mars following the 2018 global dust storm found that there was a significant increase in the seasonal dark streaks that scientists call recurring slope lineae, providing more evidence that these streaks are not caused by some form of water seepage but instead are related to some dry process.

The map to the right is figure 2 from that paper. The white dots show the candidate lineae that appeared following the 2018 global dust storm. About half were new streaks, not seen previously.

From the paper’s conclusion:
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Polygons and an inexplicable depression in ancient Martian crater floor

2:23 pm

Polygons and an inexplicable depression in ancient Martian crater
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Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on February 26, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of a small section of the floor of 85-mile-wide Galilaei Crater.

The main focus of the image is the polygonal cracks that cover the flat low areas of the crater floor, interspersed randomly by small mesas and shallow irregular depressions. The depression in this particular image is especially intriguing. It to me falls into my “What the heck?!” category, for I can’t imagine why among this terrain of polygons and pointed mesas there should suddenly be an irregularly shaped flat depression with a completely smooth floor that has no cracks at all.

The polygons are less puzzling. Galilaei Crater is very old, its impact thought to have occurred about 4 billion years ago. Though it sits at 5 degrees north latitude, practically on the Martian equator and thus in what is now Mars’ most arid region, scientists believe that once there was a lot of liquid surface water here. The overview map below illustrates this.
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