Tests on Earth appear to confirm how the Red Planet’s spider-shaped geologic formations are carved by carbon dioxide.
Spider-shaped features called araneiform terrain are found in the southern hemisphere of Mars , carved into the landscape by carbon dioxide gas. This 2009 image taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows several of these distinctive formations within an area three-quarters of a mile wide.Dark splotches seen in this example of araneiform terrain captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2018 are believed to be soil ejected from the surface by carbon dioxide gas plumes.
The study confirms several formation processes described by what’s called the Kieffer model: Sunlight heats the soil when it shines through transparent slabs of carbon dioxide ice that built up on the Martian surface each winter. Being darker than the ice above it, the soil absorbs the heat and causes the ice closest to it to turn directly into carbon dioxide gas — without turning to liquid first — in a process called sublimation .
“I love DUSTIE. It’s historic,” Mc Keown said, noting that the wine barrel-size chamber was used to test a prototype of a rasping tool designed forThis video shows Martian soil simulant erupting in a plume during a JPL lab experiment that was designed to replicate the process believed to form Martian features called “spiders.” When a researcher who had tried for years to re-create these conditions spotted this plume, she was ecstatic.
The dark plumes opened holes in the simulant as they streamed out, spewing simulant for as long as 10 minutes before all the pressurized gas was expelled.
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