Martian mesas made entirely of dry ice!
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.
» Read more
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.
» Read more