Mars image - any ideas what this is?

www.google.com...

OK you get the image, and there is three boxes, and the one on the right says infra red. Click this box, and see you get two gold boxes outlined for you.

Ignore those, but use the direction arrow to scroll left till you see a tiny third gold box.

Zoom in on this box till you get a super high res image.....

Just what the heck is this on the surface of Mars?

The black sand looking stuff?

Originally posted by D4rk Kn1ght
www.google.com...

OK you get the image, and there is three boxes, and the one on the right says infra red. Click this box, and see you get two gold boxes outlined for you.

Ignore those, but use the direction arrow to scroll left till you see a tiny third gold box.

Zoom in on this box till you get a super high res image.....

Just what the heck is this on the surface of Mars?

That is quite strange indeed. Looks almost like smoke, or as if the ground has been scorched. Anyway, according to Wikipedia, the dark blue to black part of the infrared specter is the coldest. See en.wikipedia.org...

However, I don't know what scale they are using in the mars pictures, because if you compar the colour to that on the wikipedia page it would indicate around 20C or 40F. My first thought was that this might be ice or something similar, because if you switch to the Visible og Elevation mode, you can see that this area appears to be in the shadow.

But that is just my two cents, as I'm not really qualified to analyze these pictures

It looks like “dust devil”/tornado trails similar to these (scroll to bottom).

I read a good in-depth article on this Mars feature quite some time ago; I’ll try to locate it and for post.


mg

Well its odd but in the infrared image it looks like extreme cold spots, In the elevation image is looks like low lying areas, in the visible image it looks like some scorching of the surface. So without being on the surface of mars to collect samples or even have a close up look it seems to be a cold low lying crater. Perhaps the shaded part on the visible image could be where there was some sort of heat that burned the ground uppon impact.

"Infrared" just means light that has a somewhat longer wavelength than visible light. It just happens that at around room temperature things tend to radiate light in the mid-infrared region, which lets people determine the temperature of the objects.

en.wikipedia.org...
en.wikipedia.org...
(also look up en.wikipedia.org... if you're unfamiliar how light works)

Basically, I'm pretty sure that this picture was imaged in the near-infrared region, in other words at wavelengths that are not much higher than that of red light. At these wavelengths, it's not really possible to determine the temperatures of objects since they don't glow in this region unless they're pretty hot (kinda how stuff doesn't glow red hot unless it's very hot).

My point is that this infrared map isn't meant to determine temperatures; it's simply a mapping of the surface of Mars at yet another "color", meant to discern some details that might not be that apparent in the visible spectrum.

As for what those black things are? No friggin' clue. The "dust devils" link seems like the most convincing explanation.

Well since the image is near infrared, that 'black stuff' is more than likely soil that has been disturbed by dust devils and the under laying sediments which show up differently in infrared are exposed. Note, this area we're looking at is also the area where the Spirit rover currently is. Click on the "spacecraft" thing near the top left and you'll see it's right in the middle of all that.

en.wikipedia.org...

More recently, satellite images showed the trails of dust devils on Gusev Crater's floor. The Spirit rover later photographed dust devils from the ground, and likely owes much of its longevity to dust devils cleaning its solar panels.