Official Skatz 10 Million Views Thread

[NASA]

Central Uplift with Tilted Layers as image by HiRISE.

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[NASA]

Ceraunius Tholus and Uranius Tholus are two volcanoes in the Tharsis region of Mars. Ceraunius Tholus is 130 km across and rises 5.5 km above its surroundings. The flanks of this volcano are etched with many valleys. Its neighbor, Uranius Tholus is a smaller volcano, with a base diameter of 62 km and a height of 4.5 km. This image is derived from data acquired during three separate orbits of Mars Express, which took place between 25 November 2004 and 22 June 2006. During the second orbit, Mars Express’s camera captured icy clouds drifting past the summit of Ceraunius Tholus. In the finished mosaic image there is a sharp line because the clouds had long since dispersed by the time Mars Express crossed again and took the final strip of data needed for the image.

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[NASA]

Have you ever played with dry ice (with leather gloves on of course!)? Perhaps you've made Halloween punch? Set a spooky scene? The fun comes from the fact that dry ice goes directly from solid to vapor, unlike water ice which melts into liquid when it gets warm. On Mars the seasonal polar caps are composed of dry ice (carbon dioxide). In the springtime as the sun shines on the ice, it turns from solid to gas and causes erosion of the surface. I enjoy the incredible diversity of forms that the erosion takes, and am studying the factors that give us "spiders", "caterpillars", or "starbursts", all colloquial words for what we rigorously name "araneiform" terrain. This particular example shows eroded channels filled with bright ice, in contrast to the muted red of the underlying ground. In the summer the ice will disappear into the atmosphere, and we will see just the channels of ghostly spiders carved in the surface. This is truly Martian terrain - this type of erosion does not take place anywhere naturally on earth because our climate is too warm. Written by: Candy Hansen

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[NASA]

In this fascinating observation that shows part of an impact crater, there is a very small breach (gap) in the crater rim. From examining the texture of the surrounding plains and the crater floor, we can conclude that a large lava flow overtopped and cut through a low part of the crater rim and then flowed down the wall of the crater and onto the crater floor, incising (cutting) a channel as it went. This observation is focused on the channel, but a portion of the ponded lava on the crater floor is also visible. If you want to get a better look at the crater floor, check out this CTX image and this really neat anaglyph. From this you can see that the lava covered almost the entire crater floor, however the crater central peak sticks up from the center, an island in the sea of lava. This observation was taken to study the channel and breach to learn about the properties of the lava when the flow was active a long time ago. Since part of the science rationale for taking this observation was to find the relative heights of the ponded lava surface and the surrounding plains as well as to measure the depth of the channel, this site was chosen for stereo coverage. In this case the target was imaged a second time 3.5 years (almost 2 Mars years) after the first image was acquired. Sometimes when the two parts of a stereo pair are taken far apart in time, the stereo pair turns into an inadvertent change detection pair. So did anything in this landscape change in the intervening 3.5 years? Yes! And it has nothing to do with the old lava flow (the reason the observation was taken). If you look closely at the crater wall, you can see streaks going down the slope in many different areas. These are slope streaks which are thought to form from dust avalanches that remove a thin layer of bright dust from the surface. Now going back to the stereo pair, this subimage shows two cutouts of the same part of the crater wall, but in the later image (the one on the right) we can see that an entirely new slope streak formed in the time between the acquisition of the first and second image! The new slope streak is approximately 725 meters (roughly 0.45 miles) long. This is merely one example of a new slope streak. If you look closely, you should be able to identify many slope streaks that have formed in this small area since this observation was originally acquired. Written by: Anjani Polit

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[NASA]

This observation shows a small crater within the much larger Newton Crater, and is approximately 6 kilometers across. There are gullies on the pole-facing slopes, as well as an impressive ridged floor. Is the ridged floor older than gullies? Could the ridged unit be a moraine? This is a term denoting an accumulation of boulders, stones, or other debris. Newton Crater, almost 300 kilometers in diameter, is located in the heavily cratered highlands of Terra Sirenum. It was named for Sir Isaac Newton.

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[NASA]

Relatively Fresh Crater on Distal Eastern Flank of Elysium Mons as imaged by HiRISE.

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[NASA]

Wrinkle Ridges in East Meridiani Planum as imaged by HiRISE.

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[NASA]

Well Preserved Crater in Terra Cimmeria as imaged by HiRISE.

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[NASA]

Rocky Deposits in Solis Planum as imaged by HiRISE.

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[NASA]

Ceraunius Tholus and Uranius Tholus are two volcanoes in the Tharsis region of Mars. Ceraunius Tholus is 130 km across and rises 5.5 km above its surroundings. Its neighbor, Uranius Tholus is a smaller volcano, with a base diameter of 62 km and a height of 4.5 km. The High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA’s Mars Express took this image. The perspective view has been calculated from the digital terrain model derived from the stereo channels.

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