Is this a picture of Mars or Earth? Oddly enough, it is a picture of Mars. What may appear to some as a terrestrial coastline is in fact a formation of ancient layered rocks and wind-blown sand on Mars. The above-pictured region spans about three kilometers in Schiaparelli Crater. What created the layers of sediment is still a topic of research. Viable hypotheses include ancient epochs of deposit either from running water or wind-blown sand. Winds and sandstorms have smoothed and eroded the structures more recently. The "water" that appears near the bottom is actually dark colored sand. The image was taken with the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft that has now returned over 100,000 images.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0111/marslayers_mgs_big.gif
Popular Posts
-
I've learned a great many things over the past month... "friends" at work are not neccessarily friends, people you thought wer...
-
Brad Dalton is the first to admit his theory is far-fetched: that bacteria could account for odd light emissions, as well as the reddish hue...
-
Lots of funny stuff today. Tim, check this one. http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3
-
Some interesting tidbits about Lynchs Mulholland Drive , as well as David Bowies next movie apperance. http://www.crowdsurfer.com/index.php3...
-
“We see it doing its thing, starting to fight against ordinary gravity,” Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute said about the ...
-
I'm always fascinated by ways to get stuff done, particularly at work. It's changed quite a bit since I've been in my current r... -
Let me make this clear. This is a long book. Weighing in at just under one thousand pages and probably a pound and a half this book takes ...
-
Looks like a sweet FPS for Linux... and it's team based like Counter Strike. If it's good, Hiyat's going to kill me. It took...
-
Good, good movie in every sense of the term. 8/10. http://www.newvoyages.com
