Landslides on Mars during the summer months may be caused by underground salts and melting ice, a new study claims.
Using imitation Martian soil samples, SETI Institute researchers in the US recreated Martian landslides on a miniature scale in the lab.
The frozen, salty and chlorine-laden samples were thawed under temperatures intended to replicate a Martian summer, resulting in slush and liquid water.
On Mars, melting ice in regolith – the dusty blanket of sediment on the planet s surface – is due to interactions between chlorine salts and sulfates
This creates an unstable, liquid-like slush leading to sinkholes and ground collapse, leaving noticeable dark streaks, as observed by a NASA orbiter.
In this photo, a scientist at the European Space Agency's Materials and Electrical Components Laboratory at the ESTEC technical center in the Netherlands works on essential mission work.
Copy link for An AI Has Discovered New Craters on Mars
If you ve ever played one of those spot the difference between these two photos games, you have something in common with NASA scientists.
To identify newly formed craters on Mars, they ll spend about 40 minutes analyzing a single photo of the Martian surface taken by the Context Camera on NASA s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), looking for a dark patch that wasn t in earlier photos of the same location.
If a scientist spots the signs of a crater in one of those images, it then has to be confirmed using a higher-resolution photograph taken by another MRO instrument: the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE).
Why The Happy Face Crater on Mars Is Happier Than Ever
NANCY ATKINSON, UNIVERSE TODAY
23 JANUARY 2021
Who has an even bigger grin than ten years ago? This goofy-looking crater on Mars.
These two images were taken by the HiRISE camera (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and show how Mars surface is changing over time – in this case, due to thermal erosion.
The first of these images was taken in 2011 and the other in December of 2020, at roughly the same season, and show a few different changes. There are color variations that are due to different amounts of bright frost over darker red ground, according to the HiRISE team.