What if a rock fell on Mars and no one could see it? Yes, and a beautiful herring is a bone-like pattern, according to a new study.
Scientists have now discovered thousands of tracks on the rocks of the Red Planet. The thin Chevron-shaped Mars Dust and Sand pile has shaped the tracks, the team has shown, and in a few years it has been very dim.
Rockeflies have been observed in the solar system, including the moon and even comets. But the big question is, are these processes going on in other worlds – are they happening or are they happening in the past?
A study of these temporal features on Mars, published last month Letters of Geophysical ResearchHe suggests that such rock tracks may be used to indicate recent seismic activity on the Red Planet. New evidence that Mars is a dynamic world contradicts the assumption that all of the planet’s marvels of geology have already occurred.
“For a long time, we thought Mars was a cold, dead planet,” Dowar said.
In order to find this, the planetary scientist Vijayan and his single-name Vijayan and his colleagues examined thousands of images of the equatorial region in Ahmadisabad, India. The image was taken on a NASA Mars Reconnaissance orbit by the HiRISE camera from 2006 to 2020 and showed small details up to 10 inches.
“We can isolate individual rocks,” says Vijayan.
The team manually searched for chain-like features – the stone signature that nurtured the stone slope – on the walls of the cliffs. Vijayan and his companions have seen more than 4,500 such rocks, the longest of which is more than a mile and a half.
“Sometimes the tracks change direction and sometimes new tracks are suddenly opened,” Vijayan said. Such dynamic paths indicate that a rock fell in mid-autumn and that the seed continued to descend.
About one-third of the tracks the researchers studied are not in the original images, which means they must have been created since 2006. The thing that Vijayan and his colleagues call the “rock fall” is that every time a stone touches a rock, it comes out.
And that rock fall material is temporary. Searching for similar tracks in different images at different times, the team realized that the rock fall ejecta can only be seen for four to eight years. Researchers have found that the constant gusts of wind disperse the dust and sand and cause the stomach to swell.
The ejecta falls very quickly, so when you look at it, it shows that the stone has recently been displaced. And the most common cause of rock falls is earthquakes on earth and elsewhere.
Vijayan and his associates estimate that about 30% of the rocks in the sample were deposited in the Mars Cerberus Fosa region. This is more than expected, the researchers said, adding that this area covers only 1 percent of the study area.
“The surrounding pits must have a lot of rocks,” said Vijayan. Some even have to fall a lot in the same place.
According to Alfred Macwen, a planetary geologist at the University of Arizona and a senior researcher at HiRISE, this is reasonable. Geography near Serberes Fóse exposes the area to seismic activity.
“These huge rocks are pressed against the crust around Mars,” McEwen said.
Hundreds of earthquakes have been reported since 2019 by NASA Insider Lander, two of which occurred last year in the Cerberus Fosa region.
In the future, Vijayan and his associates plan to extend their analysis to the Mars pole regions. McEwen says the device has a significant shelf life of design, but the HiRISE camera is compelling.
“HiRISE is still getting stronger,” McEwen said.
This article was originally published New York Times.
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