Quantification of Rock Clustering on Martian Patterned Ground Terrains

Details Quantification of Rock Clustering on Martian Patterned Ground Terrains Quantification of Rock Clustering on Martian Patterned Ground Terrains

Dec 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufm.p51b1419o&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #P51B-1419

Physics

[0710] Cryosphere / Periglacial Processes, [5422] Planetary Sciences: Solid Surface Planets / Ices, [5462] Planetary Sciences: Solid Surface Planets / Polar Regions, [6225] Planetary Sciences: Solar System Objects / Mars

Scientific paper

Patterned ground covers nearly all high latitude landscapes on Mars. On this terrain, rocks cluster in locations dependent on the form of the patterned ground. Here we seek to quantify the effect of patterned ground on rock distributions. First, we take a HiRISE image of rocks on patterned ground. Figure 1 shows an example of a subset of such an image. Figure 2 shows an example of the processing we perform on the image itself. We delineate individual rocks with ovals and outline each polygon. Then we measure and record the distance between each rock and the closest outline marker. After we collect the data, we compute the effective patterning (ɛ) compared to a random distribution of rocks using the following equation: ɛ = ( x / d ) / n ) where x is the sum of the distances of each rock to the nearest polygon outline, d is the average distance of a random distribution of rocks to the nearest polygon outline, and n is the number of rocks in the scene. ɛ > 1 implies rocks clustering in polygon interiors, ɛ < 1 implies clustering in exteriors and ɛ = 1 implies a randomly distributed population of rocks. The method presented here quantifies the effect of patterned ground formation on rock distributions. We will show that different patterned ground types cluster rocks at varying efficiency when compared to random rock populations. Figure 1: Rocks imaged by HiRISE on Martian patterned ground terrain. This scene is from image PSP_005756-1115 and is illuminated from the bottom left.
Figure 2: Example of analysis on rock distribution found in HiRISE image PSP_005756_1115. In actual analysis we use individual pixels to mark rocks and 2 pixel wide lines for polygons.

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