Publication Date:
2007-09-22
Description:
Water has supposedly marked the surface of Mars and produced characteristic landforms. To understand the history of water on Mars, we take a close look at key locations with the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, reaching fine spatial scales of 25 to 32 centimeters per pixel. Boulders ranging up to approximately 2 meters in diameter are ubiquitous in the middle to high latitudes, which include deposits previously interpreted as finegrained ocean sediments or dusty snow. Bright gully deposits identify six locations with very recent activity, but these lie on steep (20 degrees to 35 degrees) slopes where dry mass wasting could occur. Thus, we cannot confirm the reality of ancient oceans or water in active gullies but do see evidence of fluvial modification of geologically recent mid-latitude gullies and equatorial impact craters.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉McEwen, A S -- Hansen, C J -- Delamere, W A -- Eliason, E M -- Herkenhoff, K E -- Keszthelyi, L -- Gulick, V C -- Kirk, R L -- Mellon, M T -- Grant, J A -- Thomas, N -- Weitz, C M -- Squyres, S W -- Bridges, N T -- Murchie, S L -- Seelos, F -- Seelos, K -- Okubo, C H -- Milazzo, M P -- Tornabene, L L -- Jaeger, W L -- Byrne, S -- Russell, P S -- Griffes, J L -- Martinez-Alonso, S -- Davatzes, A -- Chuang, F C -- Thomson, B J -- Fishbaugh, K E -- Dundas, C M -- Kolb, K J -- Banks, M E -- Wray, J J -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2007 Sep 21;317(5845):1706-9.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA. mcewen@lpl.arizona.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17885125" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Extraterrestrial Environment
;
Geological Phenomena
;
Geology
;
*Mars
;
*Water
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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