Possible vehicle tracking across mars surface ?

hirise-pds.lpl.arizona.edu...


A third of the way up. Is that a vehicle track and some stationary vehicle on the surface of mars like a square box vehicle ???

Heres what I am looking at (a cut out job from the origional)




Could be nothing but looks very regular in its track across the landscape..

It looks like just one more boulder track.

Those tracks are visible on some photos from HiRISE, there is even one photo with more than ten of those tracks.

You can see that there is also a smaller track to the left of the one you found.

Its just so regular and neat that it caught my eye. You know no breaks / bounces / fractured track just plod plod plod regular as clock work...


Cheers for that super high zoom cut out, my poor laptop don't have any great software on it

Its either incredibly quick or the 'dirt' it moves never gets blown about or scuffed by 'dirt devils' as the tracks seem to go on a good bit. Would the rock have fallen from a mountain and rolled through the desert or has this movement taken place over a longer time frame of weeks/months/years?

Thats what got me.

If it was over time then the tracks would of been erased by the wind. A fast roll I would of thought (and i have seen thousands of rock / ice / mud falls in mountains and hills) would of bounced in an irregular pattern.

Which ever it is it just caught my eye and i thought id share.

just a thought.

If its so neat a trail and yet so irregular in shape, how the hell did it go in such a straight line ? I love the net, its a great stimulant for the mind.

[edit on 1-6-2008 by Dan Tanna]

reply to post by Dan Tanna


You can download IAS Viewer, the program I used, from tools page on the HiRISE site, here.

It's a Java program with some good features and it does not need many resources.

From what I have seen, although the winds on Mars are fast, the fact that the atmosphere is thinner makes them weaker than the winds on Earth, so they move less sand than "our" winds, so those tracks can be older than they should be to look like that on Earth.

And an irregular object can move in a straight line if part of the irregularities make them move to the right and the other part make it move to the left, the sum of the movements make it move in a straight line.

The pattern suggests the rock is either rolling or shuffling along can you tell how sloped the land is there?

Originally posted by ArMaP
From what I have seen, although the winds on Mars are fast, the fact that the atmosphere is thinner makes them weaker than the winds on Earth, so they move less sand than "our" winds, so those tracks can be older than they should be to look like that on Earth.

And an irregular object can move in a straight line if part of the irregularities make them move to the right and the other part make it move to the left, the sum of the movements make it move in a straight line.

You know, I just had a moment of clarity reading your post. Thank you. Its late, and i got excited, what can i say ?

Well this rolling stone wont be gathering moss! lol

Can you tell:
How big is the bolder?
How long a track it makes?

I notice it makes a pattern as it goes, one elongated indentation, then 2 smaller ones, repeated. Which means the rock is turning over as it moves in the same fashion each time.

similar thing to THIS id bet
pretty sure there was a thread about this posted a while ago

reply to post by babylonstew


Yup
You beat me to the punch

I was just about to google that LOL I think it's the same phenomenon

[edit on 2-6-2008 by SLAYER69]

Originally posted by BigC2012
The pattern suggests the rock is either rolling or shuffling along can you tell how sloped the land is there?

I can't tell how much it is sloped, but it seems definitely sloped to me (looking at the "full" picture in the OP here:
hirise-pds.lpl.arizona.edu...),
thus the rock IS rolling downhill, not on a level plain.

reply to post by TC Mike


At 25 cm/pixel the boulder should be around 6 metres wide.

The track is around 800 metres long, and can be seen here in it's full length, in an image at 12.5% zoom.