This was originally posted here, written for the IAG Planetary Geomorphology Working Group’s featured image of the month. The author, Kathryn Fishbaugh, is a HiRISE team member, and she allowed us to post a copy of it here as well. It’s great to see the results scientists are getting from HiRISE images - and you thought they were just pretty pictures!
At the north pole of Mars lies Planum Boreum, a dome of layered, icy materials similar in some ways to the large ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica and comparable in size to the former. The dome itself consists of the polar layered deposits, consisting of over 90% ice with a little bit of dust, and the basal unit, consisting of ice, dust, and sand.
The image shows a cliff in the Polar Cap deposits. The upper portion of the cliff consists, for the most part, of fractured portions of the polar layered deposits and has a reddish appearance due to dust both coating and entrained within the ice (red arrow). Below that is the basal unit, with more flat-lying layers of blueish material that is basaltic sand (blue arrow) (like the black sand beaches in Hawaii). You might also notice some lighter colored layers. Those are also fractured and composed of ice and dust, like the polar layers above them. And at the bottom of the image, sand eroding from the basal unit is collecting into dunes (white arrow). The entire cliff is about 700 m (2300 ft.) tall (comparable to the depth of the Grand Canyon).
Scientists study past climates and trends in global warming on Earth by examining the air bubbles trapped within ice cores (long, cylindrical samples of ice, extracted with a drill) taken from Greenland and Antarctica. These ice cores contain ice created from last year’s snowfall to many hundreds of thousands of years ago and have trapped bubbles with the same atmospheric composition as existed when the snow fell. From this composition, scientists can figure out what was the contemporary temperature and hence how the climate has changed over time. Similarly, the ice in the polar layers and basal unit on Mars must also have recorded how the martian climate has changed. (more…)
Many people ask us if we are still imaging the Phoenix lander, and the answer is yes, as long as there is enough light. Here is our latest view of the landing site, acquired December 21, 2008. Conditions are hazy and dark because as the season approaches northern winter on Mars, the sun does not rise as high in the sky. Looks cold!