Tag: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

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The cool image to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on November 3, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the science team labels a “Possible Tongue-Shaped Flow Feature in Protonilus Mensae.” There is no caption, so I will try to provide.

Protonilus Mensae is part of the long string of chaos terrain that runs about 2,000 miles along the transition zone between the southern cratered highlands and the northern lowland plains at about 30 to 40 degrees north latitude, and includes the other mensae regions dubbed Deuteronilus to the west and Nilosyrtis to the east. This region of Mars I like to call glacier country, because almost every high resolution photograph appears to show glacial features. To get an idea what I mean, take a gander at these past posts, their locations indicated by number in the overview map of Protonilus Mensae below:
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Cool image time! The photo to the right of two images taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) was posted as a captioned image by the orbiter’s science team today.

This crater, dubbed the Happy Face Crater because of the shape of the blobby features within it, is located on the south pole ice cap of Mars, about 200 miles from the south pole itself.

Today’s caption noted how these pictures, taken nine years apart, illustrate the change going on at the Martian south pole.

The “blobby” features in the polar cap are due to the sun sublimating away the carbon dioxide into these round patterns. You can see how nine years of this thermal erosion have made the “mouth” of the face larger. The “nose” consisted of a two circular depressions in 2011, and in 2020, those two depressions have grown larger and merged.

While this caption noted the importance of studying these long term changes in order to understand the evolution of Mars’ climate and geology, it did not give the very specific discovery these changes suggest for Mars globally, a discovery that is actually very significant.

The two ice caps of Mars have some fundamental differences, all presently unexplained. The similarities are obvious. Both have permanent caps of water ice that are presently believed to be in a steady state, not shrinking or growing. Both each winter get covered by a thin mantle of dry ice that sublimates away completely with the coming of spring.

The differences are more puzzling, as shown by the maps of the two poles below.
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Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on October 27, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It was taken not for any particular research project, but as one of the periodic images the camera team needs to take maintain the camera’s proper temperature. When they need to do this, they often will take a picture in an area not previously viewed at high resolution. Sometimes the image is boring. Sometimes they photograph some geology that is really fascinating, and begs for some young scientist to devote some effort to studying it.

In this case the photo was of the generally featureless northern lowland plains. What the image shows us is a scattering of impact craters that appear to have cut into a flat plain likely saturated with ice very close to the surface.

How can I conclude so confidently that these craters impacted into ice close to the surface? The location gives it away.
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Today’s cool image gives us a sample of the strange colorful hills in an even stranger knobby depression on Mars called Ariadnes Colles. The photo to the right, cropped and color enhanced to post here, was taken on September 10, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It focuses on just one of those colorful hills. The color strip only covers the western half, which is why that is the only part of the hill in color.

Ariadnes Colles is a patch of chaotic terrain 110 by 100 miles in size, located in the southern cratered highlands due south of Mars’s volcano country, at latitude 34 degrees south. What makes this particular patch of chaos distinct from the many others on Mars is that the hills, knobs, and mesas within it are routinely bright and colorful, compared to the darker surrounding terrain. Moreover, as noted in this Mars Express press release for images of Ariadnes Colles from that orbiter,

In contrast to other chaotic terrains … Adrianes Colles is not a water-source region. It is still debated, therefore, whether Ariadnes Colles was formed by the action of water or wind.

The darker material in the southern areas is most likely sand or volcanic ash; some slopes of the flat-topped features have been covered by this dark material that was blown up on the slopes.

The sand or volcanic ash most likely come from the Medusae Fossae Formation several hundred miles to the north, the largest volcanic ash deposit on Mars. The colors on the hill likely come from a variety of minerals.

The overview map below shows the entire patch, with the location of the hill above indicated by the white dot in the red rectangle that shows the full image location.
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Today we have two cool images, both giving us a tiny glimpse at what it is like in the middle of summer on the fringes of Mars’ south pole ice cap. Their location is indicated by the blue crosses on the overview map on the right.

To review, the south pole on Mars is, like its north pole, mostly made up of a permanent icecap of water. In the south, this icecap is mostly mixed with dust and debris in the area outlined in black and dubbed the layered deposits. On top of this is a smaller thick water ice cap, indicated by light blue, which is in turn topped by a thin cap of frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice, indicated by white. During the winter the entire pole, down to 60 degrees latitude also gets covered by a temporary mantle of dry ice, that sublimates away each spring.

Now for our cool images!
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Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on September 30, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

It shows one half of what scientists have dubbed a pollywog crater, in which there is a single breach in the crater wall, aligned with the low point in the crater’s floor. Such craters suggest that they were once water- or ice-filled, and that they drained out through the breach either quickly in a single event or slowly over multiple events.

The second image below was taken by the wide angle context camera on MRO, and not only shows this entire crater, but several other adjacent craters, all of which show evidence of glacial fill in their interiors. The latitude here is 34 degrees south, placing these craters within the mid-latitude bands where such glacial features have been found by scientists in great numbers.
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Today’s cool image is actually a bunch, all found recently in the monthly image download from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

All the photos I post below show pimple-like cones, all of which appear to be a type of small volcano. The cones are found in a wide range of locations, from the northern lowland plains to the cratered highlands to the mid-latitude transition zone between the two. They are also found at the bottom of deep canyons, in the floors of craters, and amidst mountains.

Let us begin.
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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 October 25, 2020. It shows what it calls a “possible volcanic vent east of Olympus Mons”.

Is this active? If not, how old is it. Also, the elongated shape of the vent suggests the possibility of a lava tube, or at least some underground complexity to the release of its magma.

In order to get some clarity, I emailed Sarah Sutton of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona, who requested this photograph. Her response:

The image is of a small shield volcano with an elongated vent at the summit. We don’t have complete stereo here yet, so we can’t tell exactly what the height is. This vent might have sourced tube-fed flows, but in this case, we can’t resolve such features in the image data. This and other small shield volcanoes in the vicinity are partially buried by plains-forming lava flows. The lava flows around the base overlap the flows that emanate radially from the summit vent. Therefore we infer that the shield is older than the surrounding lava flows.

The vent, which runs from the southwest to the northeast, sits on top of a sloping wide hill, which is that small shield volcano described by Sutton. The flat plains surrounding this hill are from later eruptions from other and possibly larger volcanoes. The wider overview map below might give us a clue as to the source.
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Scientists using the radar instrument on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have now confirmed that the Martian glacial features that most resemble the glaciers seen on Earth are made of substantial amounts of ice, and were possibly active and growing only a few million years ago.

“Our radar analysis shows that at least one of these features is about 500 meters thick and nearly 100 percent ice, with a debris covering at most ten meters thick,” said Berman, lead author of “Ice-rich landforms of the southern mid-latitudes of Mars: A case study in Nereidum Montes” published online in Icarus at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2020.114170. PSI scientists Frank C. Chuang, Isaac B. Smith and David A. Crown are co-authors on the paper.

Global mapping of Viscous Flow Features (VFFs), a general grouping of ice-rich flow features in the southern hemisphere of Mars shows a dense concentration in Nereidum Montes, along the northern rim of Argyre basin. Located within a northwestern subregion of Nereidum Montes is a large number of well-preserved VFFs and ice-rich mantling deposits, the paper says, potentially the largest concentrations of any non-polar region in the southern hemisphere.

…Processed data from the Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft were used to search for basal reflections across VFFs within the region. For one in particular, these observations and analysis indicate that it is composed of nearly pure water ice. Model ages obtained from crater counts and their associated size-frequency distributions (SFDs) on both ice-rich mantling deposits and small lobate VFFs suggest that the deposits stabilized several to tens of millions of years ago in the Late Amazonian Epoch, and that small lobate VFFs likely formed due to the mobilization of mantling deposits.

This data here reinforces the impressions from many other places within the 30-60 degree latitude bands on Mars where many such features are found.

Mars might be a desert, but it is a desert like Antarctica, not the Sahara. Any settlement there must use the Earth’s south pole as its guide for construction and design.

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Today’s cool image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, is intriguing for a number of reasons. Taken on September 11, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), it shows a partially buried crater found in the middle of Hellas Basin, the lowest point on Mars and what I like to call the red planet’s basement.

What makes this crater intriguing is the layered pile of material filling its interior. If I didn’t know any better, I would think some construction crew has used a bulldozer to push debris from the crater’s right half in order to smooth the ground in preparation for building a strip mall, office building, or housing development.

This of course is not what happened. Then what did create those layered piles in the crater’s left half?
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Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated and cropped to post here, was taken on September 27, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what is likely a crater that is partly buried by ice and dust and sand near or on the edge of Mars’s south polar ice cap.

It also shows an example of what planetary scientists have dubbed “cryptic terrain,” found generally on the margins of that ice cap. In this case, the location is on a plateau adjacent to the ice cap dubbed Promethei Planum. Despite a lot of searching, I could not locate any research papers describing Promethei Planum, though data outlined in one Mars Express press release from 2008 suggested it was part of the polar ice cap more than two miles thick that is covered by a thin mantle of dry ice each winter.

The strange curlicue cliffs and plateaus seen here are thought to form as part of the arrival and then sublimation away of that seasonal dry ice mantle, but how that process exactly works to create these particular geological features remains I think a mystery. North is to the top. The general grade is also downhill away from the icecap to the north.

Moreover, the overview map below, with the location of this image indicated by the blue cross, illustrates more mysteries.
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Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on October 26, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It is what the camera team calls a “terrain sample,” meaning it was not specifically requested by a researcher but was instead chosen by the camera team because they need to regularly take images to maintain the camera’s temperature. When they do this, they try to pick a location that hasn’t been photographed in high resolution previously, and that might have some interesting features. Sometimes the photo is boring. Sometimes they hit pay dirt.

In this case, the photo captured an small impact crater, about 1,300 feet across, surrounded by a spray of secondary impacts. The color portion of the image shows what I suspect are dust devil tracks cutting across a surface that, because of its blue tint, is either rough or has frost or ice within it. At 48 degrees north latitude, the possibility of the latter is high, especially because this location is northwest of the Erebus mountains, where SpaceX has its prime Starship candidate landing zone and where scientists suspect ice is readily available very close to the surface. The overview map below shows this context.
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Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on August 15, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a truly strange bunch of blocks beside a clean flow neatly organized in almost straight parallel lines.

What is going on? This location is at 38 degrees south latitude, a latitude where scientists have found a lot of features that resemble water ice glaciers, generally protected from sublimating away by a thin layer of dust and debris.

A first guess is that the smooth glacial flow at the lower right is disturbing the glacial material next to it, causing it to rip apart and break up. At the same time, the hollowed look of these glacial blocks suggests that the ice below that protective debris layer is also slowly sublimating away, causing the surface to sink.

The wider shot below helps confirm this impression.
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