Mars' Cryptic Mystery

"I'm quite serious when I say have a really good look at these new Mars images," Clarke said. "Something is actually moving and changing with the seasons that suggests, at least, vegetation."

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In June of 2001, world-renowned space visionary and author, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, observed that new images of clearly show the red planet dotted with patches of vegetation, including trees.
Poring over images on his home computer taken by the now-orbiting Global Surveyor (MGS), Clarke said that there are signs of vegetation evident in the photos.

Those weird features on recently re-surveyed by NASA’s super-powerful Reconnaissance Orbiter have uprooted Arthur C. Clarke’s view that vegetation might be growing on the red planet.  The weird topography is a result of translucent carbon dioxide ice covers the polar regions of from each season. It is warmed and sublimates (evaporates) from below, and escaping gas carves a numerous channel morphologies.

In a bit of British wit, Clarke has taken the view based on the new images that must be inhabited “by a race of demented landscape gardeners.”

The new MRO imagery has found that channels carved out by escaping gas form a “starburst” pattern, radiating out into feathery extensions.

At this week’s American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, Candice Hansen of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory detailed new looks at morphology, reporting on “lace” and “lizard skin” and branching patterns called “spiders”.

One type of landscape near Mars' south pole is called "cryptic terrain" because it once defied explanation, but new observations bolster and refine recent interpretations of how springtime outbursts of carbon-dioxide gas there sculpt intricate patterns and paint seasonal splotches.

"A lot of looks like Utah, but this is an area that looks nothing like Planet Earth," said Candice Hansen of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., deputy principal investigator for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Reconnaissance Orbiter.

In addition to radially branching patterns called "spiders," which had been detected by an earlier orbiter, other intriguing ground textures in the area appear in the new images. "In some places, the channels form patterns more like lace. In others, the texture is reminiscent of lizard skin," Hansen said.

By taking stereo pictures of a target area from slightly different angles during different orbits, HiRISE can show the surface in three dimensions. Channels found to widen as they run uphill in the cryptic terrain region testify that the channels are cut by a gas, not a liquid.

Just what causes these different shapes is a mystery. It could be different features of the underlying landscape or differences in the way the gas moves under the ice, but one thing is for sure Hansen said, "there's something that causes the different morphologies. It's a process unlike anything we have on Earth."

Earlier evidence for jets of gas active in the region came from fan-shaped blotches appearing seasonally, which scientists interpret as material fallen to the surface downwind of vents where the gas escapes. Some of the fans are dark, others bright.

Observations by the new orbiter's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for suggest that the bright fans are composed of carbon-dioxide frost.

Mars, like Earth, has seasons that shift as the planet orbits the sun. During the southern hemisphere winter, some of the carbon dioxide in the planet's atmosphere freezes to form a translucent ice cap made of the gas.

Come spring, the sun's rays penetrate this layer of ice and begin to warm the red-rock surface underneath.

Spring warms the ground under a winter-formed coating of carbon dioxide ice. Thawing at the base of the coating generates carbon-dioxide gas, which carves channels as it pushes its way under the ice to a weak spot where it bursts free. The jet of escaping gas carries dust aloft and also cools so fast from expanding rapidly that a fraction of the carbon dioxide refreezes and falls back to the surface as frost.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

Check out: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_003443_0980

Links:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2007-146
http://www.space.com/peopleinterviews/clarke_mars_010601.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/clarke_mars_banyon_010709-1.html
http://www.livescience.com/space/scienceastronomy/071211-spiders-lace.html
http://www.livescience.com/blogs/2007/12/12/arthur-clarkes-banyan-trees-on-mars-chopped-down/

Comments

[Daniel Appleton]

It would be fantastic if there was life on Mars, as scientists science - fiction writers have hoped & speculated on since the days of Percival Lowell, Ray Bradbury's " Martian Chronicles ", & the John Carter stories, but maybe we'd better look on Europa & Titan, too, since Europa MIGHT have oceans under the lanetary mantle of ice, & Titan has a methane atmosphere that might be a by - product of primitive life.

But I'm still hoping that a future robot probe - or maybe a crewed expedition ? We can dream & hope for that - might be digging or drilling down & find something, even a fossil, that we can identify as biological.

I don't think we'll find any property belonging J'onn Jonn'z, The Martian Manhunter.

[Daniel Appleton]

Excuse the earlier typographical errors.

I also don't think we'll find Richard Hoagland's " Face " &
" City " on Mars. I'd like to think that was real, but it could just be an optical illusion, like Schiaperrelli's " Canali " - canals - turned out to be.