A Mars Odyssey

“We found that the rocky surface of Mars is not bending under the load of the north polar ice cap,” said Roger Phillips of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. Phillips is the lead author of a new report appearing in this week’s online version of Science. “This implies that the planet’s interior is more rigid, and thus colder, than we thought before.”

***************************************************************************

Using the Shallow Radar instrument on the NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a detailed picture has been provided to NASA scientists to study the interior layers of ice, sand and dust that are involved in the Martian north polar cap. With long layers about 600 miles, it would be similar to one-fifth of the length of the United States in a continuous layer. Seen inside the icy layers are stacks of icy material which can form the history of the Mars’s climate history.

Studies by Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, a science team member and co-author of the study’s paper, feel that this new image and the radar that detailed it has opened up a new way of studying Mars’ past. Showing a smooth and flat border, located between the ice cap and rocky Martian crust, anything similar on Earth would have caused the surface to sag. On Mars, this is not happening.

Scientists are assuming, due to the recent studies, that the Martian surface has a strong outer shell that must be very thick and cold. Its combination of crust and upper mantle, or lithosphere, reacts on Earth during a n earthquake by breaking. On Mars, the lack of bending of this type of surface allows NASA scientist to get a good idea what the temperatures are on Mars officially, as the temperatures increase toward the interior with depth. When the radar shows thick lithosphere, the temperatures have increased gradually. It also implies that the liquid water is deeper than anticipated, where the water is warmer.

The current observations are supporting the idea that the Mars North Pole ice cap is very much geologically active, and also it is about 4 million years old which is a young age. Located were four zones of layers, finely spaced, containing ice and dust—separated by pretty much pure ice. What is theorized by the NASA scientists is that this pattern represents cycles of climate change on Mars for one million years. On May 25th the Phoenix will land on Mars, with the history of water being investigated even further.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 11:47 pm and is filed under Mission Objectives, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.