Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Places I'd like to go

re: the "hills" -- eroded crater rim segment?

Glad that link from a few days ago was useful!

I doubt a saltpan or shorelines, but still looks quite interesting, and closer than I realized at first. I didn't quite think through how small the scale was, and somehow I convinced myself that the lander was drifting NW from that arrowhead cluster of craters rather than SE towards the hills, which seems to be what people are thinking.

One question that arises is, what are the "hills" in the first place?

Are we looking at a remnant of an earlier, higher-elevation continuous surface that has mostly eroded away? Or is this something that was locally uplifed/deposited?

My own sense is that it may be part of a crater rim; the general N to S ridgeline shows a slight but consistent curvature (concave towards the lander). Of course, that raises the question of why only that arc remains. Also seems like in the portion where it gets highest and widest, it may be intersecting with the rim remnant of another, smaller crater, this one centered on the E side of the ridge. If so, that might explain why it's still there -- perhaps the point of intersection was piled especially high or whatever. My utterly unstudied gut instinct from other photos around Mars sense is that such rim intersections tend to be the last segments to be eroded away.

Of course, if crater rims there's still the question of whether the impacts came before/after the putative lake, etc. But no doubt there are lots of people who know a lot more than me about morphology and stratigraphy and whatever poring over those images; I am only a political scientist after all!

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