Tag: spaceflight

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Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on January 25, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It was taken not as part of any specific research project, but to fill a gap in MRO’s picture-taking schedule in order to maintain the camera’s temperature. When such pictures need to be taken, the camera team tries to find something of interest in the area to be shot. Sometimes the picture is boring. Sometimes fascinating. Today’s picture I think falls into the latter category.

This is a lava flood plain, as shown in the overview map below. The meandering ridges are likely what geologists call lava dikes, places where lava was extruded out through a fissure. This suggests that the flat flood lava was an older crust, and that there was hot molten lava below it that eventually pushed its way up through cracks in that crust.

This hypothesis however is not certain, as the meandering nature of the ridges does not correspond well with what one would expect from such crustal cracks.
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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and rotated to post here, was taken on December 27, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what the scientists have labeled “flat topped hills in Utopia Planitia.”

Utopia Planitia is the largest impact basin on Mars, approximately 2,100 miles across and located in the northern lowland plains.

Orbital evidence strongly suggests it is a region with a lot of near surface ice. The picture to the right reinforces that conclusion, as the entire flat plain surrounding these buttes appears like an ice field. Moreover, the full image shows many craters filled with glacial features, most of which also have softened features, as if with time the ice that impregnates their material has sublimated away.
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Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 25, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a small meandering canyon that appears to drain into a larger side canyon, all part of a region of chaos terrain dubbed Galaxias Chaos in the Martian northern mid-latitudes.

Though the latitude is 35 degrees north, where we should see lots of evidence of glacial features, especially because this is chaos terrain — terrain unique to Mars — that generally appears formed by such processes, I find few outright obvious glacial features in this cropped portion or in the full image.
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Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 2, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Taken to fill a gap in the camera’s planned image schedule in order to maintain its temperature, the location was in this sense picked not for any particular scientific research project, but because the camera team decided they might find something interesting at this spot.

What they found is a vast flat plain of polygons, a feature found frequently on the surface of Mars and thought to be formed from processes similar to the drying that creates similar polygon cracks in dried mud here on Earth. In this case, the cracks are almost certainly in ice. As Colin Dundas of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Science Center in Arizona explained to me previously,
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