If a rock falls on Mars, does it leave a trace? New research shows that it is a beautiful pattern. Thousands of tracks were created by tumbling boulders on the red planet. The team showed that the tracks are made of piles of Martian dust and sand and fade over time.
There are rockfalls in the solar system, including on the moon. The timing of these processes on other worlds is an open question.
According to a study published last month in Geophysical Research Letters, boulder tracks on Mars can be used to detect recent seismic activity. According to a planetary scientist at Brown University who was not involved in the study, the new evidence that Mars is a dynamic world runs contrary to the idea that all of the planet's exciting geology happened a long time ago. For a long time, we thought that Mars was dead.
A planetary scientist who uses a single name and his colleagues pored over thousands of images of Mars to arrive at this finding. The images were captured from 2006 to 2020 by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and revealed details as small as 10 inches across.
Dr. Vijayan said that they could discriminate individual boulders.
It is a image.
Credit...NASA/JPL/UArizona
It is a image.
The images were made from 2006 through 2020.
The team manually searched for chain-like features on the sloped walls of impact craters. The longest of the boulder tracks was over a mile and a half.
Sometimes the tracks change direction and sometimes new tracks branch off. Changing tracks are likely evidence that a boulder broke mid-fall and that its offspring continued bouncing downslope.
The tracks were absent in a third of the images the researchers studied. The bounce marks of the tracks are framed by a pile of regolith. The researchers propose that the material is kicked out when a boulder hits the surface.
The team found that boulder fall material can be seen for four to eight years after being seen in one image. The researchers suggest that winds sweeping over the surface of Mars wipe out the ejecta.
The team suggest that boulder fall ejection fades so quickly that it means that a boulder was removed recently. Seismic activity is a common cause of rockfalls.
The boulder tracks in the sample were concentrated in the region of the Mars. The researchers say that this region is more than expected since it only covers 1 percent of the study area. There are a lot of boulder falls in the surrounding craters. A few of them have multiple falls in the same location.
Alfred McEwen is the principal investigator of HiRISE and is not involved in the research. The area is prone to seismic activity due to the geography of the Tharsis volcanic region. Dr. McEwen said that the rock loaded up on the surface creates stresses in the surrounding crust of Mars.
There have been hundreds of marsquakes detected by NASA since the beginning of the year.
The analysis will be extended to Mars's polar regions in the future. Despite the instrument being past its design lifetime, Dr. McEwen said the HiRISE camera will hopefully oblige. HiRISE is still going strong.
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