Tag: spaceflight

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Today’s cool image not only shows us some puzzling lava terrain on Mars, it highlights the continuing camera problems on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) that began last month and now appear to be permanent.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 29, 2023 by the high resolution camera on MRO. The black strip through the middle of the picture highlights MRO’s ongoing problem, as described by the science team in its monthly download of new MRO high resolution pictures:

The electronics unit for CCD RED4 started to fail in August 2023 and we have not been acquiring images [data] in this central swath of the images. The processing pipelines will be updated to fill this gap with the IR10 data for some products. The 3-color coverage is now reduced in width.

The picture shows the failure of this electronics unit. The color strip is now only about half as wide as normal, with the other half the black strip with no data. As the problem first appeared in July, and remains unresolved, it probably is permanent. Though MRO’s high resolution camera can still produce images, they will be less useful, their center strip blank.

This failure should not be a surprise. In fact, it is remarkable that so little has gone wrong with MRO considering its age. The spacecraft was launched in 2005, entered Mars orbit in 2006, and has been working non-stop now for about seventeen years. Moreover, it was built in the early 2000s, making it almost a quarter century old at this point. How much longer it can survive is an open question, but a lifespan of twenty years is usually the limit for most spacecraft. The Hubble Space Telescope however gives us hope MRO can last longer, as Hubble has now been in orbit for 33 years, and continues to operate.

Despite this data loss, the picture still shows some intriguing and puzzling geology
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Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 22, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The white spot near the center of the overview map above marks its location, deep inside the 2,000-mile-long region in the northern mid-latitudes I call glacier country, as everything there seems covered with glacial features of some kind. All the features in this picture are smaller than 50 feet high, based on the resolution of the topographical data obtained by Mars Global Surveyor in the 1990s.

What makes this picture interesting are the layers, made most obvious in the terraced mesa in the upper left. Surrounding this mesa for dozens of miles in all directions are similar layered features, all suggesting that the glacial ice sheets that appear to coat this region have either have been sublimating away over time, or when growing grew less with each subsequent growth cycle.

Though both have or are likely happening, the latter most likely explains the terraces, as there is a lot of evidence on the surface of Mars showing that each subsequent growth cycle produced smaller glaciers and ice layers.

From the perspective of future colonists, this picture once again shows that water will readily accessible on Mars, as long as you travel north or south of the equator at least 30 degrees of latitude. This location is at 42 degrees north, and is very typical of this whole region.

Circling the north pole of Mars is a gigantic dune field dubbed Olympia Undae, with its densest regions (marked in red on the overview map to the right) estimated to be 700 miles long and covering 120 degrees of longitude.

Where does all the sand come from that created this dune ocean? We now have a rough idea. The arrows on the map to the right indicate the direction of the prevailing winds, as recently determined by scientists studying the orientation of dunes. From this it appears that much of the dust comes from the north polar icecap itself, from its lower layers where dust and ice are cemented together. The prevailing winds, especially in the canyons that cut into the icecap, drive that dust out from the lower layers, where it over eons has piled up in that circular ocean of sand.

The white cross marks the location of today’s cool image, an attempt by scientists to photograph at high resolution one of the sources of this sand, on the edge of the icecap.
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