The Antioch ESPACE Academy is a local and regional center for standards-based astronomy education at all grade levels.

The Academy provides students with a motivational venue for learning about science through research or outreach oriented projects based on instruction in earth science, astronomy and space science.

 

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Mars Global Surveyor Images

These images were requested by the Astronomy and Space Science class. Malin Space Science Systems, currently managing the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, fulfills requests based on the merit of questions posed with the request, the position of the spacecraft, whether or not the particular area had been requested before, and whether or not MGS is being used for another purpose.

 

Three requests have been fulfilled for us. This is a sampling of interesting features within the three images.

MGS gallery
This is a dune field, colorized with GraphicConverter. The light in the image is coming from the bottom. The dunes are straight and uniform enough to indicate that the wind is probably from a single direction. The original image was greyscale and the coloring is simply decoration.

Another dune field in the same image.

Academy student Ashley Hall has analyzed the dunes in the upper dune field to determine their spacing and height. Click here to read her research.

 

 

Note the discolored area to the right of the bottom dune field, surrpunded by a series of craters or possibly sinkholes.

One other dune field. Several of the dunes exhibit "split ends." I wonder if that is typical of dunes in general or these in particular? The odd thing is that the dunes do not seem to cover the small crater about 2/3 of the way from the bottom.

This crater is quite sharp, but the dunes surrounding it are rather shallow. Difficult to say if there's enough blowing sand to fill in the crater, but you would think it would have been covered or filled long ago.
Same image as the top of the page but not colorized.
I call this one the "sickle." It looks like the wind is curling around the edge of an old crater to createt he dune field interior to the arc. Note the dune field is not parallel but almost concentric.
This interesting crater formation is seen near the top of the image I requested in Ophir Chasma.
This was the reason for the original image request. This is the edge of a crater. There is a substantial gap which dominates the central part of the image between the two ridges. A channel or valley follows from this gap for a number of kilometers south.
A different area reveals yet another crater with dunes inside of it. As a possible topic for investigation we can look for relationships between crater diameter, rim height, numbers of dunes, heights of dunes, and ratio of dunes to crater areas.

This was the third image I requested. It shows a dark spot in the center of a larger crater. My first guess was that the dark spot is an ejecta blanket. It is not, however, from the large circular crater shown half cut off on the left side of the image.

However, if you look at other pictures of craters from this area of Mars, you discover that there are many craters in the area with a dark spot off center from the crater in the same relative position. I find this very odd and need to do some more research to understand what I am seeing.
Detail of the crater mentioned above. Note the dune field (ripples) in the center of the crater.

 

 


Jeff Adkins, Director
astronomyteacher@mac.com

Cheryl Domenichelli, Assistant Director
cheryldomenichelli@antioch.k12.ca.us

4700 Lone Tree Way
Antioch, CA 94531

The ESPACE Academy is sponsored in part by a grant from the California Department of Education's Specialized Secondary Program.