Hubble captures spectacular image of Chamaeleon Cloud Complex

Newswand: NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has sent a spectacular picture of star-forming Chamaeleon Cloud Complex.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, K. Luhman and T. Esplin (Pennsylvania State University), et al., and ESO; Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

This image captures one of three segments that comprise a 65-light-year wide star-forming region named the Chamaeleon Cloud Complex. The segment in this Hubble composite image, called Chamaeleon Cloud I (Cha I), reveals dusty-dark clouds where stars are forming, dazzling reflection nebulae glowing by the light of bright-blue young stars, and radiant knots called Herbig-Haro objects.

Herbig-Haro objects are bright clumps and arcs of interstellar gas shocked and energized by jets expelled from infant “protostars” in the process of forming. The white-orange cloud at the bottom of the image hosts one of these protostars at its center. Its brilliant white jets of hot gas are ejected in narrow torrents from the protostar’s poles, creating the Herbig-Haro object HH 909A.

The cross-like spikes around bright stars in the image occur when light waves from a very bright point source (like a star) bend around Hubble’s cross-shaped struts that support the telescope’s secondary mirror. As the light waves pass these struts, they coalesce on the other side, creating the bright, spikey starburst effect we see.

Hubble studied Cha I as part of a search for extremely dim, low-mass brown dwarfs. These “failed stars” lie somewhere in size between a large planet and a small star (10 to 90 times the mass of Jupiter), and do not have enough mass to ignite and sustain nuclear fusion in their cores. Hubble’s search found six new low-mass brown dwarf candidates that are helping astronomers better understand these objects.

This 315-million-pixel composite image is comprised of 23 observations made by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Gaps between those observations were filled by 20 Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 images. Any remaining gaps were filled with ground-based data from ESO’s VISTA VIRCAM. To download the full high-resolution version of this image, visit Hubble Captures Chamaeleon Cloud I.

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Ice-rich impact crater found on Mars

Newswand: ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) has sent an image which shows ice-rich impact crater on Mars.

Photo credit: ESA

This image could easily be mistaken for a tree stump with characteristic concentric rings. It’s actually an impressive birds-eye view into an ice-rich impact crater on Mars. Tree rings provide snapshots of Earth’s past climate and, although formed in a very different way, the patterns inside this crater reveal details of the Red Planet’s history, too.

The image was taken by the CaSSIS camera onboard the ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) on 13 June 2021 in the vast northern plains of Acidalia Planitia, centred at 51.9°N/326.7°E.

The interior of the crater is filled with deposits that are probably water-ice rich. It is thought that these deposits were laid down during an earlier time in Mars’ history when the inclination of the planet’s spin axis allowed water-ice deposits to form at lower latitudes than it does today. Just like on Earth, Mars’ tilt gives rises to seasons, but unlike Earth its tilt has changed dramatically over long periods of time.

One of the notable features in the crater deposits is the presence of quasi-circular and polygonal patterns of fractures. These features are likely a result of seasonal changes in temperature that cause cycles of expansion and contraction of the ice-rich material, eventually leading to the development of fractures.

Understanding the history of water on Mars and if this once allowed life to flourish is at the heart of ESA’s ExoMars missions. TGO arrived at Mars in 2016 and began its full science mission in 2018. The spacecraft is not only returning spectacular images, but also providing the best ever inventory of the planet’s atmospheric gases with a particular emphasis on geologically and biologically important gases, and mapping the planet’s surface for water-rich locations. It will also provide data relay services for the second ExoMars mission comprising the Rosalind Franklin rover and Kazachok platform, when it arrives on Mars in 2023. The rover will explore a region of Mars thought once to have hosted an ancient ocean, and will search underground for signs of life.

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Plenty of water was there on Mars 2 billion years ago

Newswand: There was plenty of water on Mars 2 to 2.5 billion years ago and it has evaporated as the atmosphere has thinned.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used its Context Camera to capture this image of Bosporos Planum, a location on Mars. The white specks are salt deposits found within a dry channel. The largest impact crater in the scene is nearly 1 mile (1.5 kilometers) across.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Mars once rippled with rivers and ponds billions of years ago, providing a potential habitat for microbial life. As the planet’s atmosphere thinned over time, that water evaporated, leaving the frozen desert world that NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) studies today.

It’s commonly believed that Mars’ water evaporated about 3 billion years ago. But two scientists studying data that MRO has accumulated at Mars over the last 15 years have found evidence that reduces that timeline significantly: Their research reveals signs of liquid water on the Red Planet as recently as 2 billion to 2.5 billion years ago, meaning water flowed there about a billion years longer than previous estimates.

The findings – published in AGU Advances on Dec. 27, 2021 – center on the chloride salt deposits left behind as icy melt water flowing across the landscape evaporated.

While the shape of certain valley networks hinted that water may have flowed on Mars that recently, the salt deposits provide the first mineral evidence confirming the presence of liquid water. The discovery raises new questions about how long microbial life could have survived on Mars, if it ever formed at all. On Earth, at least, where there is water, there is life.

The study’s lead author, Ellen Leask, performed much of the research as part of her doctoral work at Caltech in Pasadena. She and Caltech professor Bethany Ehlmann used data from the MRO instrument called the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) to map the chloride salts across the clay-rich highlands of Mars’ southern hemisphere – terrain pockmarked by impact craters. These craters were one key to dating the salts: The fewer craters a terrain has, the younger it is. By counting the number of craters on an area of the surface, scientists can estimate its age.

MRO has two cameras that are perfect for this purpose. The Context Camera, with its black-and-white wide-angle lens, helps scientists map the extent of the chlorides. To zoom in, scientists turn to the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) color camera, allowing them to see details as small as a Mars rover from space.

Using both cameras to create digital elevation maps, Leask and Ehlmann found that many of the salts were in depressions – once home to shallow ponds – on gently sloping volcanic plains. The scientists also found winding, dry channels nearby – former streams that once fed surface runoff (from the occasional melting of ice or permafrost) into these ponds. Crater counting and evidence of salts on top of volcanic terrain allowed them to date the deposits.

“What is amazing is that after more than a decade of providing high-resolution image, stereo, and infrared data, MRO has driven new discoveries about the nature and timing of these river-connected ancient salt ponds,” said Ehlmann, CRISM’s deputy principal investigator. Her co-author, Leask, is now a post-doctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, which leads CRISM.

The salt minerals were first discovered 14 years ago by NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter, which launched in 2001. MRO, which has higher-resolution instruments than Odyssey, launched in 2005 and has been studying the salts, among many other features of Mars, ever since. Both are managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

“Part of the value of MRO is that our view of the planet keeps getting more detailed over time,” said Leslie Tamppari, the mission’s deputy project scientist at JPL. “The more of the planet we map with our instruments, the better we can understand its history.”

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Gemini Observatory catches images of stellar jets

Newswand: The Gemini Observatory has captured an image of stellar jets roughly 10,000 light-years from Earth, in the galactic plane of the Milky Way, close to the boundary between the constellations Sagittarius and Ophiuchus.

Photo credit: NSF’s NOIR Lab

Sinuous stellar jets meander lazily across a field of stars in these images captured from Chile by the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. The gently curving stellar jets are the outflow from young stars, and astronomers suspect their sidewinding appearances are caused by the gravitational attraction of companion stars.

These crystal-clear observations were made using the Gemini South telescope’s adaptive optics system, which helps astronomers counteract the blurring effects of atmospheric turbulence.

Young stellar jets are a common by-product of star formation and are thought to be caused by the interplay between the magnetic fields of rotating young stars and the disks of gas surrounding them. These interactions eject twin torrents of ionized gas in opposite directions, such as those pictured in two images captured by astronomers using the Gemini South telescope on Cerro Pachón on the edge of the Chilean Andes.

Gemini South is one half of the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, that comprises twin 8.1-meter optical/infrared telescopes on two of the best observing sites on the planet. Its counterpart, Gemini North, is located near the summit of Maunakea in Hawai‘i.

The jet in the first image, named MHO 2147, is roughly 10,000 light-years from Earth, and lies in the galactic plane of the Milky Way, close to the boundary between the constellations Sagittarius and Ophiuchus. MHO 2147 snakes across a starry backdrop in the image — an appropriately serpentine appearance for an object close to Ophiuchus. Like many of the 88 modern astronomical constellations, Ophiuchus has mythological roots — in ancient Greece it represented a variety of gods and heroes grappling with a serpent. MHO 1502, the jet pictured in the second image, is located in the constellation of Vela, approximately 2000 light-years away.

Most stellar jets are straight but some can be wandering or knotted. The shape of the uneven jets is thought to be related to a characteristic of the object or objects that created them. In the case of the two bipolar jets MHO 2147 and MHO 1502, the stars which created them are obscured from view.

In the case of MHO 2147, this young central star, which has the catchy identifier IRAS 17527-2439, is embedded in an infrared dark cloud — a cold, dense region of gas that is opaque at the infrared wavelengths represented in this image. The sinuous shape of MHO 2147 is caused because the direction of the jet has changed over time, tracing out a gentle curve on either side of the central star.

These almost unbroken curves suggest that MHO 2147 has been sculpted by continuous emission from its central source. Astronomers found that the changing direction (precession) of the jet may be due to the gravitational influence of nearby stars acting on the central star. Their observations suggest that IRAS 17527-2439 could belong to a triple star system separated by more than 300 billion kilometers (almost 200 billion miles).

MHO 1502, on the other hand, is embedded in a totally different environment — an area of star formation known as an HII region. The bipolar jet is composed of a chain of knots, suggesting that its source, thought to be two stars, has been intermittently emitting material.

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NASA’s NEA Scout to chase asteroid

Newswand: NASA’s Near Earth Asteroid Scout will visit and chase to study an asteroid estimated to be smaller than a school bus – the smallest asteroid ever to be studied by a spacecraft.

Photo credit: NASA

Launching with the Artemis I uncrewed test flight, NASA’s shoebox-size Near-Earth Asteroid Scout will chase down what will become the smallest asteroid ever to be visited by a spacecraft. It will get there by unfurling a solar sail to harness solar radiation for propulsion, making this the agency’s first deep space mission of its kind.

The target is 2020 GE, a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) that is less than 60 feet (18 meters) in size. Asteroids smaller than 330 feet (100 meters) across have never been explored up close before. The spacecraft will use its science camera to get a closer look, measuring the object’s size, shape, rotation, and surface properties while looking for any dust and debris that might surround 2020 GE.

Because the camera has a resolution of less than 4 inches (10 centimeters) per pixel, the mission’s science team will be able to determine whether 2020 GE is solid – like a boulder – or if it’s composed of smaller rocks and dust clumped together like some of its larger asteroid cousins, such as asteroid Bennu.

2020 GE was first observed on March 12, 2020, by the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey as part of its search for near-Earth objects for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office.

Developed under NASA’s Advanced Exploration Systems Division by Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and JPL, NEA Scout is a science and technology demonstration mission that will enhance the agency’s understanding of small NEAs. Using a six-unit CubeSat form factor, it will ride as one of 10 secondary payloads aboard the powerful Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which will launch no earlier than March 2022 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NEA Scout will then be deployed from a dispenser attached to the adapter ring that connects the rocket and Orion spacecraft.

Although large asteroids are of most concern from a planetary defense perspective, objects like 2020 GE are far more common and can pose a hazard to our planet. The Chelyabinsk meteor was caused by a small asteroid about 65 feet (20 meters) in diameter – it exploded over the Russian city on Feb. 15, 2013, creating a shockwave that broke windows all over the city and injured more than 1,600 people. That was the same class of NEA as 2020 GE.

Low mass, high performance

Learning more about asteroid 2020 GE is only part of NEA Scout’s job. It will also demonstrate solar sail technology for deep space encounters. When released from its dispenser after launch, the spacecraft will use stainless steel alloy booms to unfurl a solar sail that will expand from a small package to a sail about the size of a racquetball court, or 925 square feet (86 square meters).

Made from plastic-coated aluminum thinner than a human hair, this lightweight, mirror-like sail will generate thrust by reflecting solar photons – quantum particles of light radiating from the Sun. The sail will provide most of NEA Scout’s propulsion, but small cold-gas thrusters with a limited propellant supply will also assist with maneuvers and orientation.

Sunlight acts as a constant force, so a tiny spacecraft equipped with a large solar sail can eventually travel many miles per second. Solar sails are a high-performance propulsion system for low-mass and low-volume spacecraft.

In September 2023, asteroid 2020 GE will make a close approach with Earth, and with a gravitational assist from the Moon, NEA Scout will have gathered enough speed to catch up. Mission navigators will fine-tune NEA Scout’s trajectory before the spacecraft approaches within a mile of the asteroid.

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Officials asked to come up with plans for Anjanadri development by Feb 15

Newswand: Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam executive officer Dr KS Jawahar Reddy has instructed the officials concerned to come up with action plan on the development of Anjanadri Tirumala before February 15.

EO reviewing development plans.

A review meeting on various subjects was held in Sri Padmavathi Rest House at Tirupati on January 20 wherein additional EO AV Dharma Reddy and Tirupati JEO Veerabrahmam also participated.

Earlier, TTD CE Nageswara Rao presented a PPP on the outlay of Anjanadri Hills, Hanuman Birthplace etc. The EO instructed the engineering officials to come out with plan on Anjanadri.

It may be mentioned here that TTD has declared Anjanadri near Akasa Ganga area as the birth place of Sri Anjaneya Swamy, with the support of strong evidence provided by Puranas, Sastras, and Epigraphs.

Earlier review meetings were also held separately on Sri Padmavathi Paediatric Cardiac Hospital in Tirupati and Tarigonda Vengamamba Dhyana Mandiram at Tirumala.

The EO directed the officials concerned to come out with an action plan on the Vengamamba Dhyana Mandiram before February 7 after visiting the site.

The EO instructed the officials to submit a Detailed Project Report (DPR) on February 15 about the works with respect to Paediatric Cardiac Hospital.

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Black hole giving birth to new stars

Newswand: Rather than swallowing the stars, a black hole is creating new starts in a distant galaxy.

A pullout of the central region of dwarf starburst galaxy Henize 2-10 traces an outflow, or bridge of hot gas 230 light-years long, connecting the galaxy’s massive black hole and a star-forming region. (Credits: NASA, ESA, Zachary Schutte (XGI), Amy Reines (XGI); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

Often portrayed as destructive monsters that hold light captive, black holes take on a less villainous role in the latest research from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. A black hole at the heart of the dwarf galaxy Henize 2-10 is creating stars rather than gobbling them up. The black hole is apparently contributing to the firestorm of new star formation taking place in the galaxy. The dwarf galaxy lies 30 million light-years away, in the southern constellation Pyxis.

A decade ago this small galaxy set off debate among astronomers as to whether dwarf galaxies were home to black holes proportional to the super massive behemoths found in the hearts of larger galaxies. This new discovery has little Henize 2-10, containing only one-tenth the number of stars found in our Milky Way, poised to play a big part in solving the mystery of where super massive black holes came from in the first place.

“Ten years ago, as a graduate student thinking I would spend my career on star formation, I looked at the data from Henize 2-10 and everything changed,” said Amy Reines, who published the first evidence for a black hole in the galaxy in 2011 and is the principal investigator on the new Hubble observations, published in the January 19 issue of Nature.

“From the beginning I knew something unusual and special was happening in Henize 2-10, and now Hubble has provided a very clear picture of the connection between the black hole and a neighboring star forming region located 230 light-years from the black hole,” Reines said.

That connection is an outflow of gas stretching across space like an umbilical cord to a bright stellar nursery. The region was already home to a dense cocoon of gas when the low-velocity outflow arrived. Hubble spectroscopy shows the outflow was moving about 1 million miles per hour, slamming into the dense gas like a garden hose hitting a pile of dirt and spreading out. Newborn star clusters dot the path of the outflow’s spread, their ages also calculated by Hubble.

This is the opposite effect of what’s seen in larger galaxies, where material falling toward the black hole is whisked away by surrounding magnetic fields, forming blazing jets of plasma moving at close to the speed of light. Gas clouds caught in the jets’ path would be heated far beyond their ability to cool back down and form stars. But with the less-massive black hole in Henize 2-10, and its gentler outflow, gas was compressed just enough to precipitate new star formation.

Reines expects that even more research will be directed at dwarf galaxy black holes in the future, with the aim of using them as clues to the mystery of how super massive black holes came to be in the early universe. It’s a persistent puzzle for astronomers. The relationship between the mass of the galaxy and its black hole can provide clues. The black hole in Henize 2-10 is around 1 million solar masses. In larger galaxies, black holes can be more than 1 billion times our Sun’s mass. The more massive the host galaxy, the more massive the central black hole.

Current theories on the origin of super massive black holes break down into three categories: 1) they formed just like smaller stellar-mass black holes, from the implosion of stars, and somehow gathered enough material to grow super massive, 2) special conditions in the early universe allowed for the formation of super massive stars, which collapsed to form massive black hole “seeds” right off the bat, or 3) the seeds of future super massive black holes were born in dense star clusters, where the cluster’s overall mass would have been enough to somehow create them from gravitational collapse.

So far, none of these black hole seeding theories has taken the lead. Dwarf galaxies like Henize 2-10 offer promising potential clues, because they have remained small over cosmic time, rather than undergoing the growth and mergers of large galaxies like the Milky Way. Astronomers think that dwarf galaxy black holes could serve as an analog for black holes in the early universe, when they were just beginning to form and grow.

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NASA’s Curiosity Rover measures carbon signature on Mars

Newswand: Scientists have announced that samples being collected on Mars by NASA’s Curiosity rover are rich in a type of carbon that on Earth is associated with biological processes.

Photo credit: NASA

While the finding is intriguing, it doesn’t necessarily point to ancient life on Mars, as scientists have not yet found conclusive supporting evidence of ancient or current biology there, such as sedimentary rock formations produced by ancient bacteria, or a diversity of complex organic molecules formed by life.

To analyze carbon in the Martian surface, the scientists team used the Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS) instrument inside the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) chemistry lab aboard Curiosity. SAM heated 24 samples from geologically diverse locations in the planet’s Gale crater to about 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, or 850 degrees Celsius, to release the gases inside. Then the TLS measured the isotopes from some of the reduced carbon that was set free in the heating process. Isotopes are atoms of an element with different masses due to their distinct number of neutrons, and they are instrumental in understanding the chemical and biological evolution of planets.

On Mars, Curiosity researchers found that nearly half of their samples had surprisingly large amounts of carbon 12 compared to what scientists have measured in the Martian atmosphere and meteorites. These samples came from five distinct locations in Gale crater, the researchers report, which may be related in that all the locations have well-preserved, ancient surfaces.

Mars is unique because it may have started off with a different mix of carbon isotopes than Earth 4.5 billion years ago. Mars is smaller, cooler, has weaker gravity, and different gases in its atmosphere. Additionally, the carbon on Mars could be cycling without any life involved.

“There’s a huge chunk of the carbon cycle on Earth that involves life, and because of life, there is a chunk of the carbon cycle on Earth we can’t understand, because everywhere we look there is life,” said Andrew Steele, a Curiosity scientist based at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.

Steele noted that scientists are in the early stages of understanding how carbon cycles on Mars and, thus, how to interpret isotopic ratios and the nonbiological activities that could lead to those ratios.

Curiosity, which arrived on the Red Planet in 2012, is the first rover with tools to study carbon isotopes in the surface. Other missions have collected information about isotopic signatures in the atmosphere, and scientists have measured ratios of Martian meteorites that have been collected on Earth.

Curiosity scientists will continue to measure carbon isotopes to see if they get a similar signature when the rover visits other sites suspected to have well-preserved ancient surfaces. To further test the biological hypothesis involving methane-producing microorganisms, the Curiosity team would like to analyze the carbon content of a methane plume released from the surface. The rover unexpectedly encountered such a plume in 2019 but there’s no way to predict whether that will happen again. Otherwise, researchers point out that this study provides guidance to the team behind NASA’s Perseverance rover on the best types of samples to collect to confirm the carbon signature and determine definitively whether it’s coming from life or not. Perseverance is collecting samples from the Martian surface for possible future return to Earth.

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Water vapour found on an exoplanet

Newswand: An international team of scientists, led by Jonathan Brande of the University of Kansas, found water vapor on exoplanet TOI-674 b.

 Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This recently discovered planet, a bit bigger than Neptune and orbiting a red-dwarf star about 150 light-years away, places it in an exclusive club: exoplanets, or planets around other stars, known to have water vapor in their atmospheres. Many questions remain, such as how much water vapor its atmosphere holds. But TOI-674 b’s atmosphere is far easier to observe than those of many exoplanets, making it a prime target for deeper investigation.

The planet’s distance, size and relationship to its star make it especially accessible to space borne telescopes. At 150 light-years, it’s considered “nearby” in astronomical terms. The star itself, relatively cool and less than half as big around as our Sun, can’t be seen from Earth with the naked eye, but this too translates into an advantage for astronomers. As the comparatively large planet – in a size-class known as “super Neptune” – crosses the face of its smallish star, starlight shining through its atmosphere can be more easily analyzed by our telescopes. Those equipped with special instruments called spectrographs ¬– including the just-launched James Webb Space Telescope – can spread this light into a spectrum, revealing which gases are present in the planet’s atmosphere.

The discovery grew from a partnership between the tried-and-true Hubble Space Telescope and TESS, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, launched in 2018. The planet was first found by TESS, then its light spectrum was measured by Hubble. Data from the now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope also helped astronomers tease out some of the planet’s atmospheric components. If the Webb telescope, once it’s up and running, is turned on TOI-674 b, it should be able to examine the planet’s atmosphere in far more detail.

Only three other Neptune-sized exoplanets have had aspects of their atmospheres revealed so far, though the advent of telescopes like Webb promises a golden age in the study of exoplanet atmospheres.

The new planet can claim membership in another exclusive group: inhabitants of the so-called “Neptune Desert.” TOI-674 b orbits its small star so tightly that a “year” on this planet, once around the star, takes less than two days. But among the thousands of exoplanets confirmed in our galaxy so far, a strange pattern has emerged: Planets in the size-class between Neptune and Jupiter are extremely rare in orbits of three days or less. The rarity of such planets, and the analysis of those that do turn up, could provide important clues to the formation of planetary systems in general – including our own.

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Rolling stones on the Mars

Newswand: ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter has sent an image which shows the rolling stones on the Mars.

There’s more to this image of Mars than first meets the eye: nestled in the detail of the cliff face that cuts through this scene are signs of geology in motion. Zooming in reveals several boulders that have fallen from the cliff edge, leaving small dimples in the soft material as they tumbled down-slope.

Phoo credit: ESA

The image was taken by the CaSSIS camera onboard the ESA/Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter on 3 August 2020, and captures a slice through the maze-like system of the aptly named Noctis Labyrinthus.

The cliff-like feature running through the central portion of the image is part of a horst-graben system, which comprises raised ridges and plateaus (horst) either side of sunken valleys (graben) created as a result of tectonic processes that pulled the planet’s surface apart. The entire network of plateaus and trenches making up Noctis Labyrinthus spans some 1200 km, with individual cliffs reaching 5 km above the surface below.

Elsewhere in this image and in particular towards the right-hand side are patches of linear ripples that have been shaped by the wind. A few small impact craters also pockmark the scene.

The image was taken over the easternmost part of Noctis Labyrinthus at 265.8°E/8.70°S in the Phoenicis Lacus Quadrangle, near the intersection with Lus Chasma of Valles Marineris – the ‘grand canyon’ of Mars.

TGO arrived at Mars in 2016 and began its full science mission in 2018. The spacecraft is not only returning spectacular images, but also providing the best ever inventory of the planet’s atmospheric gases, and mapping the planet’s surface for water-rich locations. It will also provide data relay services for the second ExoMars mission comprising the Rosalind Franklin rover and Kazachok platform, when it arrives on Mars in 2023.

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