You are not logged in.
Pages: 1
<<Halfway around Mars, Opportunity is exploring clockwise around "Victoria Crater," a bowl about 800 meters (half a mile) across. Cliff-like promontories alternate with more gradually sloped alcoves around the scalloped rim. The impact that dug the crater exposed layers that had been buried.
"The images are breathtaking," said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator for the rovers. "Every promontory we've seen has the kinds of layering expected for ancient wind-blown sand deposits." >>
The above quotation, from the NASA/JPL website following the Martian Rovers, is the first to explicitly state that layering on Mars may be due to wind-blown deposits, instead of their usual claim that they must be due to water-born material.
This make perfect sense considering that we know there are annual planet-wide windstorms that raise a huge amount of dust and redistribute it around a good part of the planet. That'ws a fact. Planet-wide liquid water is still only a hypothosis, a hope, a prayer...
Offline
Huh? Wind deposition has been a favored hypothesis for soil formation on Mars since the Viking missions. Surface features the wind-driven processes can't explain do make all the headlines, true, but that hardly makes this NASA's first admission that there's dust on Mars.
"We go big, or we don't go." - GCNRevenger
Offline
Pages: 1