One of the longest-standing mysteries about Mars has been the presence of dark and light streaks on the rolling hills surrounding Olympus Mons.
This week’s image, from the European Space Agency, shows some of these streaks captured last October.
A striking feature of these aureoles is the periodic appearance of bright and dark streaks—sometimes for days and sometimes for years.
The image in today’s post comes from the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, and it has been slightly modified to enhance the appearance of the streaks.
Source: European Space Agency
The existence of bands of light and dark on the undulating hills around Olympus Mons has long been a mystery. The European Space Agency’s image this week displays a few of these streaks that were photographed in October of last year.
At roughly 22 kilometers above the surface of Mars, this enormous mountain is more than twice as high as Mount Everest on Earth. Aureoles, which are hummocky deposits that were created by mountain landslides, encircle it. The periodic appearance of bright and dark streaks, which can last for days or years, is one of these aureoles’ most noticeable characteristics.
Scientists have been wondering what they could be for decades.
Surprisingly, the streaks resemble flowing water. These features were initially thought to be brine or salty water flows that stayed liquid long enough to move down the aureole, according to scientists. This raised the intriguing prospect that there may still be life in these oases on Mars’ surface.
But it seems that this is no longer the case. These dry slopes are probably the result of fine dust layers abruptly sliding off steep terrain, according to new research that was published Monday in the journal Nature Communications. The researchers employed a machine-learning algorithm to search through and catalog streaks in 86,000 NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite photos in order to arrive at this conclusion. They mapped out half a million streaks on Mars’ surface. The scientists discovered no signs of water while doing this.
The image used in today’s post was taken from the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter of the European Space Agency and has been slightly altered to make the streaks look better. That appears to be art.
The European Space Agency is the source.
