Tag: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

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Today’s cool image comes from today’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO) high resolution picture of the day, rotated and cropped to post here. The original was taken back on March 28, 2017.

What formed those strange circular ridges and the many small cracks and hollows? The caption provided is somewhat vague and I think confusing:

This formation looks like a crater from a meteor impact rather than an ancient caldera of a volcano. Connected to the crater is a carved-out area that resembles a lake bed. At high resolution, we might be able to determine the likelihood of a water lake bed or lava bed. This observation will give insight into some of the interesting geology of this area.

The crater this caption is referring to is not visible in the image provided. It can be seen to the west of this location, in the MRO context camera picture below.
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Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on July 17, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as an alluvial fan.

I have also seen them label this kind of avalanche as mass wasting, where the material moves down slope suddenly in a single mass.

The image shows the aftermath of such an event, after a large blob of material broke free from the mountainside and slid almost as a unit downhill to settle more than two miles away on the floor of the canyon. The distance traveled and the blobby nature of the flow both reveal how the lower Martian gravity changes the nature of such events, compared to what you might see on Earth. The flows can travel farther, and can hold together as a unit easier.

The overview map below not only provides the context, but it tells us that such events are remarkably common in this place.
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On Mars, one of the most common kinds of landscape is called chaos terrain. Made up of mesas, buttes, and cross-cutting random canyons, this geology is not seen on Earth, and when first identified by scientists in early orbital pictures in the 1970s, it baffled them. While it is clear that some form of erosion process caused it, the scientists did not have enough data then to figure out what that process was.

Today scientists have a rough theory, based on what they now know about Mars’ overall geology and its climate and orbital history. The canyons of chaos terrain were originally fault lines where either water or ice could seep through and widen. See this January 2020 post for a more detailed explanation.

Most of the cool images I have posted of chaos terrain have been in places in the mid-latitudes that are covered with glaciers. See for example this December 2019 post of one particular mesa in glacier country, with numerous glaciers flowing down its slopes on all sides. That mesa is quite typical of all such mesas in the mid-latitudes.

Today’s cool image above, cropped to post here, takes us instead to the Martian very dry equatorial regions. The photo was taken on May 17, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and like mid-latitude chaos, it shows a collection of random mesas with canyons cut almost randomly between.

Unlike the mid-latitudes, however, there is no evidence of glaciers here. Instead, the canyons and mesa slopes are covered with dust, shaped into wind-blown dunes.

As always, the overview map below gives us some context.
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Today’s cool image is also today’s picture of the day from the science team of the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO. That picture, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, can be seen to the right. As the caption authors Sharon Wilson and Sarah Sutton write:

The smooth volcanic surfaces in the Gordii Fossae region are sometimes interrupted by long, narrow troughs, or fissures. These fissures form when underground faults, possibly involving magma movement, reach the near-surface, allowing material to collapse into pits or an elongated trough. This fissure appears to have erupted material that flowed onto the surface.

If you use your imagination, this trough resembles a gecko with its long tail and web-shaped feet!

This impression is even more evident in the wider image taken by MRO’s context camera below.
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Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 30, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the dusty dry floor of the chaos region of rough terrain in a side canyon of Valles Marineris, near its outlet. The color strip and the bright outcrops suggest that this terrain contains interesting minerals and resources. To determine exactly what those materials are however requires more information not available in this photo.

This ancient chaos terrain is the leftover eroded sea floor of a intermittent inland sea, leftover water from the catastrophic floods that are theorized to have flowed out of Valles Marineris and carved its gigantic canyons.

The overview map below shows this hypothesized sea.
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Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on August 29, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label an “inverted channel in Arabia Terra,” a small example of the more than 10,000 miles of fossilized rivers in this region on Mars that scientists have identified using MRO.

They are made of sand and gravel deposited by a river and when the river becomes dry, the channels are left upstanding as the surrounding material erodes. On Earth, inverted channels often occur in dry, desert environments like Oman, Egypt, or Utah, where erosion rates are low – in most other environments, the channels are worn away before they can become inverted. “The networks of inverted channels in Arabia Terra are about 30m high and up to 1–2km wide, so we think they are probably the remains of giant rivers that flowed billions of years ago. [emphasis mine]

Since this fossilized river is located at 11 degrees north latitude, smack in the middle of the dry equatorial regions of Mars, it has certainly been a dry desert for a very long time. You can see how barren the terrain appears by looking at the wider view afforded by MRO’s context camera below.
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