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Mars Global Surveyor
Mars Orbiter Camera

Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) High Resolution Images:

Ancient Lakes on Mars? Results for Elysium Basin

 

Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbiter Camera Release:          MOC2-71a, -71b, -71c, -71d, -71e, -71f
Mars Global Surveyor Mars Orbiter Camera Image ID:         576191357.21904 
							   P219-4;
							   576191427.21905
							   P219-5; and
							   576988441.23804
							   P238-4
							   
(A) Elysium_basin_region_ICON.gif
350 KByte GIF image

(A) The Elysium Basin and Marte Vallis, Mars. This view provides context for the images that follow. The white box indicates the outlines of the local context image shown in (B), below. The numbered items inside the white box correspond to MOC images shown in (D), (E), and (F). The base map used here is a combination of the U.S. Geological Survey's Mars Digital Image Mosaic (MDIM) and red-band mosaic (both derived from Viking Orbiter images). The map is a simple cylindrical projection. North is up, latitude and longitude of the corners are labeled.

(B) 21904_05_23804_rel_ICON.gif
1480 KByte GIF image -or- 540 KByte GIF image -or- 135 KByte GIF image

(B) Local context for three MOC images described below. Each of the three MOC pictures is labeled by its image identification number: 21905 is shown in (C) and (D), 21904 is in (E), and 23804 is in (F). Each of these MOC images was reprojected and resized to fit within this base map. The base map is a mercator-projected mosaic of Viking Orbiter images 631a41, 631a43, 631a44, 631a45, 631a46, and 631a48. The Viking images were taken on the 631st orbit of Viking 1 in 1978. Illumination is from the upper right, north is up.

(C) 21905_cntx_lbld_ICON.gif
160 KByte GIF image

(C) Local context for MOC image 21905. This particular MOC image, shown in (D), below, was the first critical clue that indicated that the surface revealed 20 years ago by Viking 1 is a volcanic rather than sedimentary surface. Image 21905 was shrunk and projected to fit within this context base map, which is a mercator-projected mosaic from Viking Orbiter 1 images 383s12 (taken in 1980) and 631a43 (taken in 1978). Illumination is from the upper right, north is up.

(D) 21905s_41perc_rel_ICON.gif
415 KByte JPEG image

(D) MOC image 21905, showing the textured surface in Elysium Basin. The texture seen here--one of dark, flat fragments separated by bright cracks--is termed platey, and indicates a surface where the dark areas, or plates, separated and moved apart. Such a texture occurs when the rigid surface of a once-fluid material (for example, ice over water, or the cooled surface of a lava flow over the molten interior) is broken up and moved about by the underlying fluid. In this case, the relationships strongly suggest lava, which today is hardened to rock throughout. The brightness variations might be due to differences in roughness and/or trapping of windblown dust. The sinuous ridges in this picture have steep slopes (around 50°) and stand several meters (yards) in height. Such ridges can be caused by collision of the hard, crusted plates as they move over a fluid interior. The image as shown here has a resolution of approximately 12 meters (39 feet) per pixel. Illumination is from the right. This picture was taken on the 219th orbit of Mars Global Surveyor on April 4, 1998. The image is located around 5.8°N, 208.9°W.

(E) 21904s_sub_rel_ICON.gif
205 KByte JPEG image

(E) MOC image 21904 subframe, showing additional lava flows and ridges at the northern margin of the Elysium Basin (see (B)). Note the dark tongue-shaped lava flow feature in the upper left corner--this indicates a contact between the much older lava flows of the Elysium volcanic rise and the younger flows of the Elysium Basin. The image as shown here has a resolution of about 14 meters (46 feet) per pixel. Illumination is from the right. This picture was taken on the 219th orbit of Mars Global Surveyor on April 4, 1998, and it is located near 8.7°N, 208.4°W.

(F) 23804_sub_17perc_ICON.gif
95 KByte GIF image

(F) MOC image 23804 subframe. Each pixel in this image represents an area approximately 24 meters (78 feet) across. This picture looks "noisy" because it was nearly over-exposed; however, it still provides an improved resolution of the platey surface of Elysium Basin when compared with the Viking images of the same region (the Viking image resolutions are around 270 meters (886 feet) per pixel). North is approximately up, illumination is from the right. This picture was taken on the 238th orbit of Mars Global Surveyor on April 13, 1998, and it is located near 6.8°N, 205.2°W.

You may need to adjust the images for the gamma of your monitor to insure proper viewing.

Note: This MOC image is made available in order to share with the public the excitement of new discoveries being made via the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. The image may be reproduced only if the image is credited to "Malin Space Science Systems/NASA". Release of this image does not constitute a release of scientific data. The image and its caption should not be referenced in the scientific literature. Full data releases to the scientific community are scheduled by the Mars Global Surveyor Project and NASA Planetary Data System. Typically, data will be released after a 6 month calibration and validation period.

Click Here for more information on MGS data release and archiving plans.

 CAPTION

The Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) was designed--in part--to test the variety of hypotheses about the history of Mars that have been proposed since the Mariner and Viking missions of the 1960s and 1970s.

In April 1998, one of the efforts undertaken by the MOC science team was to test two competing ideas about the history of the Elysium Basin--a huge depression that stretches about 3,000 kilometers (1,865 miles) east-to-west in the region south of the Elysium volcanic rise.

There were two competing ideas about the Elysium Basin. One hypothesis held that the depression was once the site of a vast lake approximately 1,500 meters (4,900 feet) deep. Because the floor of Elysium Basin has very few small, fresh impact craters, it was proposed that this lake dried up relatively recently in martian history--that is, the lake would have been younger than most of the volcanoes, craters, and even the Ares Vallis flood channel in which is located the Mars Pathfinder landing site. At some point, the lake in Elysium Basin was thought to have reached such a depth that it began to spill over a rise on its east end. The water spilling out the east end of Elysium Basin was thought to have created Marte Vallis--a channel containing streamlined islands that stretches for hundreds of kilometers (miles) to the northeast. The lake bed and channel, it was proposed, might make good places to land future rovers that could travel around and collect samples that might contain evidence of past martian life.

The other hypothesis held that the Elysium Basin floor was covered with flows that were emplaced as extremely fluid lava (molten rock). It was suggested that a lake of water could have been in the basin long, long ago, but that the most recent geologic events had erupted huge volumes of very fluid lava across the basin floor. Some of this lava was proposed to have even poured out of the basin and travelled down Marte Vallis. In this hypothesis, it was assumed that Marte Vallis--named for the Spanish word for "Mars"--was first carved by water, and then was a conduit for lava from volcanic eruptions. The lavas were proposed to have been very fluid--behaving almost like water. Such fluid lavas are known on Earth to result from molten rock that has a low concentration of silica, a high temperature, and/or a high eruption rate.

MOC images of the floor of Elysium Basin (see (D), (E), and (F), above) taken in April 1998 revealed that the basin floor is covered with lava, not lake sediment. In other words, MOC has found that the Elysium Basin might not be a good place to look for evidence of martian life that might have existed in a lake.

However, the lava textures that MOC found are striking and indicate something very important about the geologic history of Mars. The surface texture of this lava includes giant plates that appear to have been broken up and floated on the surface of a fluid. In this case, the fluid was molten lava. The implication is that the Elysium Basin was once the site of giant, ponded lava flows that were many many hundreds of kilometers (miles) across.

With the MOC images in hand, it is now quite easy to understand the older, lower-resolution Viking images. These Viking images (seen in (A), (B), and (C), above) showed a surface of dark plates with intervening bright surfaces. But they did not make sense--some thought they could somehow be volcanic, others thought they might be related to differences in the way that wind had eroded a dried lakebed. Now it can be seen that there are many dark plates that once floated on molten lava. When the lava was erupted, the upper surface crusted and cooled. The textures in these lavas indicate that they flowed and became cracked. Some cracks widened, and portions of the surface crust became rafts of solid rock--a few many kilometers (miles) across--that moved in the direction that the lava underneath was flowing. Other Viking and MGS images have shown similar platey lava textures in Marte Vallis, suggesting the possibility that some of the lava spilled into this valley and flowed thousands of kilometers (hundreds of miles) to the northeast.

The sparse occurrence of younger impact craters on the platey lava surfaces suggests that the eruptions happened relatively recently in Mars history. These eruptions would be much younger than the youngest of the large martian volcanoes like Ascraeus Mons and Olympus Mons in the Tharsis region; but they would still have occurred many, many millions of years ago (i.e., the pictures are not evidence that Mars is volcanically active today).

The MOC science team is continuing to study the images of Marte Vallis and Elysium Basin. Similar lava textures have been seen elsewhere on the planet, and are leading to some interesting revisions of our understanding of the volcanic and geologic history of the red planet. It should be noted that the observation of a volcanic surface in Elysium Basin does not rule out the possibility that the depression was also once the site of a water lake, nor is it clear whether Marte Vallis is the result of volcanism alone, or volcanism that occurred some time after water had been present to carve the channel system.

The results of the initial study of the Elysium Basin are given in a paper entitled "Mars Global Surveyor Camera Tests the Elysium Basin Controversy: It's Lava, Not Lake Sediments," by Alfred S. McEwen, K. S. Edgett, M. C. Malin, L. Keszthelyi, and P. Lanagan, presented at the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting on October 29, 1998.



Malin Space Science Systems and the California Institute of Technology built the MOC using spare hardware from the Mars Observer mission. MSSS operates the camera from its facilities in San Diego, CA. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars Surveyor Operations Project operates the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft with its industrial partner, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, from facilities in Pasadena, CA and Denver, CO.

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