Scientists are a step closer to a 40-year-old mystery about some unusual looking crater on Mars.
These functions as a double-layered ejecta (DLE) crater and research attracted attention, as their wreckage pattern does not match, are the typical understanding like craters formed.
Craters are smallpox scars that form on the surface of a planet or moon, when a high-speed rock smashes into the surface. The fast-moving collision sprays, dirt and other impurities in a ring. There are more than 600 craters on Mars, the two layers of this debris, however, have. A new study suggests, a glacial landslip, the second layer would have created. (7 Greatest mysteries of Mars)
The study by Brown University geology researcher David Weiss and James Head is detailed in the 7th August edition of the journal geophysical research letters.
Landslides on ice
The first DLEs came into view during the NASA Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s. The twin spacecraft carried an orbiter and a lander. The first steps taken during the lander on Mars, is the orbiter remained associated for years, and much of the planet with their cameras.
In the decades since covered scientists then extensive evidence, the water and ice much of Mars in the distant past revealed.
The only large deposits of ice on the red planet are today on the North and South poles, though stay icy tracks in other areas. DLEs, however while formed the surface of Mars by a giant sheet of glacial ice, the researchers, past completed covered after testing in climatic studies.
At most this ice sheet reached in the mid-latitudes of Mars and was about 165 feet (50 meters) thick. Ice is smooth, which means that as soon as the crater was formed and sprayed the rubble out, slipped the dirt and a second layer over the first formed.
Groovy observations
The theory with more detailed observations of DLEs corresponds to the authors. Many of the crater have radial grooves or grooves radiating from the craters epicenter. These are common in Earth landslides, especially those that take place on the glacier.
Steep slopes are also required to the scenario, to do the work. The scientists calculated that the crater to form DLEs 15.5 miles (25 kilometers) in diameter must be smaller, because something bigger to flat inclined would have. Next, examined hundreds of DLEs on Mars, and discovered that almost everyone is the size or smaller respondents.
DLEs show also some secondary crater, which happen after thicker parts the wreckage carve grooves in the surface. Since this would have ended up ejected material on the ice, these features would be gone after the ice melted.
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