TAR
March 12, 2018
How about some basic physics? It’ll be easy, I promise. Just look at the pretty picture below (click on it to see it better): The big crater is ~400 m (1/4 mile) across. Wind blows sediment from the top to […]
February 12, 2018
This is the upwind edge of a dune field (825×625 m, 0.51×0.39 mi). Winds blow down a cliff (offscreen) from the lower right, blowing sand toward the upper left. Elongated dunes have formed parallel to the resultant wind direction, only […]
January 22, 2018
A Piece of Mars: This is a section of Arnus Vallis (scene is 1.25×1 km, 0.78×0.62 mi). It’s a >300 km long valley that was carved out, not by water, but by lava, long ago. Since then the wind has […]
January 2, 2018
A Piece of Mars: The dunes (or maybe they’re ripples) in this valley appear to be fuzzy (the view is 625×775 m, 0.39×0.48 mi). They’re not really fuzzy, but it’s not actually clear what’s going on. They seem to have […]
December 4, 2017
A Piece of Mars: To the upper right of this 0.85×0.6 km (0.53×0.37 mi) scene is a flat-lying plain strewn with large ripples. To the lower left is a rugged hill with gray rock laced with white veins (this might […]
November 8, 2017
A Piece of Mars: In the floor of what might have been an old fluvial channel there are a bunch of really neat dunes (or maybe ripples, they’re TARs and we don’t know yet what they are). One spire pokes […]
October 30, 2017
A Piece of Mars: The wind on Mars likes to make textiles (unfortunately the term geotextiles is already taken for other purposes). This 1×0.6 km (0.62×0.37 mi) scene shows two different sets of ripples. The larger set has straight to […]
September 25, 2017
A Piece of Mars: Take a look at the windblown stuff in this 0.55×0.625 km (0.34×0.39 mi) scene. Those are intricate patterns of a sort of dune-ripple thing that forms all over on Mars, but not so much on Earth. […]
July 17, 2017
A Piece of Mars: No great scientific insights today, just a really lovely view of bright TARs and some very dark sand in this 0.875×0.5 km (0.54×0.31 mi) scene. Only one major wind acts in this region, moving sediment toward […]