Catalog Page for PIA21102

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PIA21102: Deposits along the Northern Wall of Melas Chasma

This image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows mounds of light-toned deposits within the central portion of Valles Marineris.

Target Name:	Mars
Is a satellite of:	Sol (our sun)
Mission:	Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)
Spacecraft:	Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)
Instrument:	HiRISE
Product Size:	2880 x 1800 pixels (w x h)
Produced By:	University of Arizona/HiRISE-LPL
Other Information:	Other products from ESP_045960_1705
Full-Res TIFF:	PIA21102.tif (15.56 MB)
Full-Res JPEG:	PIA21102.jpg (1.168 MB)

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

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It has been known since the 1970s when the Viking orbiters took pictures of Mars that there are large (i.e., several kilometers-thick) mounds of light-toned deposits within the central portion of Valles Marineris. More recent higher resolution images of Mars, including this image of Melas Chasma, show that the wall rocks of Valles Mariners also contain similar, albeit thinner, light-toned deposits.

Spectral data from the CRISM instrument indicate that the larger mounds are composed of sulfates. Some of the wall rock deposits are also made up of sulfates, but others contain clays or mixtures of several kinds of hydrated materials, suggesting that multiple aqueous processes, perhaps at different times within Valles Marineris, formed the variety of deposits we now observe.

The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

Image Credit:

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Image Addition Date:

2016-10-05