Photo: NASA/JPL/UArizona
There are places here on Earth where humans have reshaped mountains for religious belief, national pride, or even that elusive something called art. The list of such places is long, and includes anything from the Chinese red sandstone Leshan Giant Buddha, to Mount Rushmore and its four presidential heads.
As far as we know, this is the only planet where such a thing happens, simply because we haven’t been able so far to detect a civilization, at least comparable to ours, elsewhere. But that isn’t stopping us from imagining things, especially now that we have easy access to info on and images of other worlds.
Mars is one of the favorite fields on which our imagination runs wild, with dreams, hopes and rants being fueled by the countless images the hardware we have there keeps sending back.
Today’s trigger for an unlikely imagination exercise is this image here, captured by the HiRISE camera from an altitude of 252 km (157 miles) all the way back in 2010. It shows a portion of the large Cross Crater (65 km/40 miles in diameter) located in the Terra Sirenum region of Mars, with its features so altered by natural forces that it now seems like the result of an alien hand carving the environment.
Cross is a region of interest for scientists here on Earth because its mineralogy is “different from other surrounding terrains and Martian basins” - more to the point, it contains “alunite and kaolin-bearing sediments.“
What’s more, the place seems to have once been filled with water, which was likely “supplied by regionally upwelling groundwaters as well as through an inlet valley.”
We are not being told exactly what processes shaped the area in the way seen in the photos above, but even if it looks utterly dead, Mars still is a very active place.
Mars is one of the favorite fields on which our imagination runs wild, with dreams, hopes and rants being fueled by the countless images the hardware we have there keeps sending back.
Today’s trigger for an unlikely imagination exercise is this image here, captured by the HiRISE camera from an altitude of 252 km (157 miles) all the way back in 2010. It shows a portion of the large Cross Crater (65 km/40 miles in diameter) located in the Terra Sirenum region of Mars, with its features so altered by natural forces that it now seems like the result of an alien hand carving the environment.
Cross is a region of interest for scientists here on Earth because its mineralogy is “different from other surrounding terrains and Martian basins” - more to the point, it contains “alunite and kaolin-bearing sediments.“
What’s more, the place seems to have once been filled with water, which was likely “supplied by regionally upwelling groundwaters as well as through an inlet valley.”
We are not being told exactly what processes shaped the area in the way seen in the photos above, but even if it looks utterly dead, Mars still is a very active place.
Google News