It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
originally posted by: putnam6
No valleys on Mars? are you sure
originally posted by: Blackfeline
I meant at these places where the hills and cliffs look like they have just colapsed on themselves. I did not mean to suggest that there are no valleys on Mars. I am sure that there are plenty. Sheesh!!
originally posted by: putnam6
No valleys on Mars? are you sure
Both rovers exceeded their planned 90-day mission lifetimes by many years. Spirit lasted 20 times longer than its original design until its final communication to Earth on March 22, 2010. Opportunity continues to operate more than a decade after launch. In 2015, Opportunity broke the record for extraterrestrial travel by rolling greater than the distance of a 26-mile (42-kilometer) marathon.
Giant Asteroid Collision May Have Radically Transformed Mars
An ancient, global-scale impact could explain the Red Planet’s mysterious “two-faced” appearance
The planet Mars has been associated with its namesake god of war for millennia, but its own past may have been more violent than was previously imagined. A new study suggests that Mars was once hit by an asteroid so large that it melted nearly half of the planet’s surface.
Researchers came to this conclusion while studying a strange feature known as the Martian hemispheric dichotomy—a dramatic drop in surface elevation and crustal thickness that occurs near Mars’ equator. In the northern hemisphere the land’s elevation is on average about 5.5 kilometers lower and the crust is around 26 kilometers thinner.
The dichotomy was discovered in the early 1970s when NASA’s Mariner 9 probe made the first detailed map of the Martian surface. The feature has perplexed astronomers ever since. Previous studies hinted that the dichotomy was formed by a glancing asteroid strike near the Martian north pole. But the new work, published in Geophysical Research Letters in December, suggests that a far more violent impact, at the opposite end of the planet, may have been the actual cause.
In the study astronomers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (E.T.H. Zurich) used an advanced 3-D computer model to simulate the effect of an asteroid impact on Mars 4.5 billion years ago, when experts think the dichotomy formed. They tested a rival hypothesis for its origin—that it had been formed by an impact at Mars’s south pole.
When the team simulated a collision with an asteroid about 4,000 kilometers across (slightly larger than Earth’s moon) they found that it caused the crust of the “virtual” Mars to reform into two distinct zones: a thicker one in the southern hemisphere and a thinner one in the north, similar to what we see on the real planet. What’s more, the predicted thicknesses of the two crustal segments matched the real values observed on Mars almost exactly. Taken together these predictions provide compelling evidence that a south polar impact was the cause of the dichotomy. “This study advances an alternate impact origin for the Martian dichotomy,” says Craig Agnor, an astronomer at Queen Mary, University of London, who was not involved in the work.
originally posted by: Klassified
a reply to: Blackfeline
Mars was one of the victims of a war between factions of the Anunaki vying for power about a half a million years ago.
I don't recall where I read that, but it was a cool story, so....
originally posted by: Blackfeline
When I look at the photos coming back from Mars, they often look very "alien" to me. Meaning that we dont see these geologic rock formations here on Earth.
Some of the cliffs look like they have just melted, exactly like a partially melted candle looks, except much huger.
Other rock formations look like the hills and cliffs have just crumbled, right there, very quickly.