Mars’ Northern Dunes: Volatiles and Geology

Details Mars’ Northern Dunes: Volatiles and Geology Mars’ Northern Dunes: Volatiles and Geology

Oct 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.3022h&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #30.22; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.1031

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Mars has a vast sea of sand dunes at high northern latitudes known as the north polar erg. These dunes are blanketed with seasonal CO2 frost in the winter and early spring. Sharp dune crests, steep slipfaces and lack of craters suggest that these northern dunes have experienced geologically recent resurfacing. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) imaged a limited number of sites in the dunes with resolution better than 1 m to look for changes.
New HiRISE images show extensive erosion of northern hemisphere dunes associated with seasonal CO2 ice sublimation in the spring. With 2 Mars years of observations we have observed the CO2-ice-free state of the dunes in the first year, frost-covered in late winter, the spring sublimation process, and the ice-free state of the dunes again in the second year. Temporal sequences of images of individual sites were acquired to monitor the sublimation process throughout spring.
Ice-free images have been compared between northern summer in MRO year 1 (Mars Year 29) and MRO year 2. New alcoves and aprons are detected on numerous dunes in several sites. In one particular barchan dune field 20% of the dunes show substantial changes and 20% show minor changes. These changes can be traced to locations of early enhanced CO2 ice sublimation. The sublimation activity manifests itself on the dunes as cracks along the dune crest from which dark streaks of sand and dust move down the slipface. The sand travels out onto patterned ground, enabling measurement of the extent of the new aprons, in some cases meters from the dune boundary one year earlier.
In order to maintain fresh dunes against such erosion the dune-building processes must still be at work on Mars today.
This work was partially supported by JPL/CIT/NASA.

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