Cumbrian Sky

WELCOME TO "CARNIVAL OF SPACE " READERS!

("Eccentric"? Me?!?! :-) )

Apart from some notable exceptions - Ian Rankin springs immediately to mind - I've never been a huge fan of detective stories, in books or on TV or the cinema screen. Too much faffing about, too many red herrings to pick up, examine and then toss back into the sea, too many chunks of turgid, cliche-cluttered dialogue and too many cardboard characters. But occasionally, just occasionally, I get involved in a mystery, and then it takes over everything, and I can't rest until I've cracked the case.

Of course, being a "space enthusiast" (we really need to come up with a better term than that, guys... it's very train spotterish) my mysteries are all Out There, in space, either between the stars or, more likely, on the surface of another world, usually Mars - and that's where my latest mystery presented itself.

It's all Emily Lakdawalla's fault. For those few readers who don't know who Emily is, she's the person behind The Planetary Society's fantastically successful blog, which is visited every day by thousands of people across the globe, and is frequently referred to and pointed towards on websites and blogs throughout what used to be called "cyberspace". Emily is a true detective, finding stories, cracking mysteries and debunking outrageous claims, and she obviously feels a real passion for and commitment to the exploration of space. Emily peppers her blog entries with links to other websites, and you can guarantee that each and every link she posts will be worth visiting. Recently she posted a link to a new website where very clever people from Arizona State University have pulled and linked together all the pictures taken of the surface of Mars - right from Viking to MRO - and made them available, through a very easy-to-use map format interface, for browsing and study.

You can use this site in one of two ways. If you know Mars VERY well you can use it as a martian version of "Google Earth", and zoom in on and explore features you already know. Or if you're not so knowledgeable about Barsoom - or even if you are, but just want to look around at random - you can just go to the maps, select an area that takes your fancy, or jumps out at you for some reason, and start exploring it. In this way, the site is a bit like a martian version of "Galaxy Zoo" - you just click your mouse, a picture comes up, and if it's not that interesting you just click to get another picture, and if it is intersting you hang around a while and look at it a bit more closely.

Sounds harmless enough, right? Wrong. I thought Galaxy Zoo was addictive until I found the Martian Image Database. It assimiliated me with the ease and cold calculating effeciency of a Borg. And soon I was touring all my favourite martian tourist sites with all the enthusiasm of a recently-retired winnebago owner. The slopes of Olympus Mons, the summit of Arsia Mons, the floor of Valles Marineris, the folded, banded cliffs of the northern ice cap, all were viewed through the eyes of Viking, Global Surveyor, Odyssey and MRO, and there was much drooling and dropping of jaw as images I'd never seen before appeared on my screen. It was almost like seeing a whole new Mars!

Eventually I couldn't resist any longer, and I pointed the arrow towards the southern edge of Ganges Chasma, in search of what I've always considered to be "my crater", a crater seen and photographed by Viking, a crater that has been seen by millions of people on the pages of almost every astronomy book and magazine printed since Viking's images started beaming back to Earth. You'll have seen it yourself, I'm sure: one side of it has been eaten away by the relentless erosion of the chasm, with what used to be its northern wall reduced to a great apron of a landslide spread out on the valley floor far, far below. I love that crater, have done since the very first time I saw it on the paint-stained pages of an old copy of National Geographic in an art class at school, and more than once I've imagined going there in person, trekking to the edge of the crater and peering over it and down into the abyss beyond...

Cue clicking...

And yes, there it was, looking as striking as ever. My crater. Still my favourite after all these years.

Eventually I was ready to move on, and my eyes roved around My Crater's surroundings on the HiRISE map.  I spotted a few anonymous-looking blue "tracks" over to My Crater's right, and with some more time to kill before I had to do other things decided to take a look at them. The first one was just another view of just another part of the Ganges Valley's northern side... ridges, outcrops, the usual... The second was the same. Hmm, might be time to move on, I thought, maybe wander south, towards those crater-pocked highlands. Oh alright, let's just try one more -

Wow... look at that. Just Look At That.

It might make me fickle, but I have to be honest and admit that as soon as I saw That Crater I gave my heart to it, wrenching it out of the shaking hands of My Crater and handing it over to its younger, prettier replacement. If I broke My Crater's heart in the process I'm sorry, but, well, you know, you can't fight it when you have such strong feelings, can you?

The New Crater was nothing less than a martian work of art. Sculpted by wind and weather, erosion and Time, the New Crater was a monument to what makes Mars so special. It had everything. It was huge for a start. It had several terraces within its sloping walls. It had exquisite detail on its wide floor. And, like My Crater, it was located on the edge of the chasm, and being eaten away by it. But the chasm was obviously hungrier here, because almost half of the crater had been devoured, revealing layer after layer of rock beneath the crater floor, and all shown in beautiful detail...

Smitten? You could say that.

And that's where the mystery began. Well, not quite a mystery, but a hunt. Because it struck me that a crater so beautiful, so striking, must have been seen by previous missions, right? I mean, the MRO guys hadn't just found it, not with HiRISE's narrow field of view; that would have had to have been the luckiest random camera aim ever. No, there had to be pictures of the New Crater elsewhere - and, with wonderful timing, Emily had provided me with the means to find them!

And so the hunt began. Little did I know that by the time I had finished I would have learned a lot more about Mars, about the way our imaging capabilities have improved over the years and decades, and about why I love that cratered, rock-strewn, salmon-skied planet so much...

First, obviously, Viking. Had either or both of the famous 1970s orbiters seen New Crater (wish I had a better or even a proper name for it, but I don't, sorry... I'll have to track one down now...)? To find out I selected the Viking database, calling up the map - it was a sea of red! Wow, looks like Viking had imaged almost every square inch of the planet! Zooming in let me narrow down the images taken of the area to a dozen or so, and then it was just a matter of finding the best shot of New Crater. Ah, there it was... just... on image "f610a34", little more than a notch, a nick in the north wall of Ganges Chasma. Almost not there, in fact, showing no hint, no trace of the exquisite slope and floor detail from the HiRISE images, and it was hard to believe that what looked so stunning through HiRISE's lenses had been so invisible to Viking's more primitive eyes. But then I reminded myself the two spaceprobes, and their technology, were separated by three decades, so maybe it wasn't so surprising after all...

Then another Viking image caught my eye, and I clicked on "f014a38" - and when it appeared I actually let out a little yelp of pleasure, like a dog presented with a new ball. Look At That! There, clearly visible on a narrower angle Viking view of Ganges Chasma, taken in February 1978, at an oblique angle which made it look more realistic than the first, was New Crater, and there was detail within it too!

I could see the widest, longest terrace inside its walls, and vague, tantalising hints of detail on its floor too. But that wasn't what had inspired the yelp. What had made me sit up and take notice was a feature just to the left of the crater - a huge, and I mean huge, landslide, that had spread out across Ganges' floor like a sack of spilled grain, covering miles and miles and miles of Ganges floor. Not only that, but in doing so it had rolled over and covered material from a landslide that had occurred on the opposite side of the canyon! This part of the Great Valley had surely seen some action over the millennia. There were landslides, great spills of dust and rock,everywhere...

Now my fire was well and truly lit. If Viking's cameras had taken a picture like that, and MRO's HiRISE camera had been turned on the area too, then it must have been targetted by the spaceprobes inbetween also! Time to do some more exploring...

Sure enough, calling up the Mars Global Surveyor map I found that that spaceprobe's cameras had also been turned towards New Crater, and oh the pictures were pretty! MGS must have passed almost directly overhead when it took R0402237, a long strip of black and white taken in April 2005. The image showed New Crater at the top, the southern wall of Ganges at the bottom, and the twin landslides meeting between them. On this image there was quite a lot of detail visible inside New Crater - its terraces, dune- and ripple-covered floor, its slightly raised centre, they were all there...

... but a second image, a crop of R0402237, showed a close-up of the New Crater, and revealed almost (I thought) as much detail as HiRISE had seen, with the crater's terraced inner walls standing out in stark relief, and thin, gateau-like layers of rocks of different density and composition visible beneath its smooth floor, exposed to the thin martian air - and MGS's gaze - by the dinosaur-slow but continual erosion of the chasm.

But now I felt the pull of Mars Odyssey, and so, reluctantly leaving MGS's beautiful narrow portrait and close-up behind - both Saved safely in a folder on my computer, of course - I began exploring the area through the unblinking, all-seeing but neglected eye of THEMIS...

... and found just one single image. V22805002, a long, looooong strip, taken almost exactly a year ago, with New Crater at the top again, and the Twin Landslides beneath it. At first glance it wasn't much of an improvement on the MGS photo, if anything it was a step backwards in terms of resolution, with just a hint of that intricate layering beneath the crater floor, and a small amount of detail on its terraces too, but it still counted, and it was proof that my New Favourite Crater was special. Viking had photographed it, Mars Global Surveyor had photographed it, and Mars Odyssey had photographedit too. Three different teams controlling three different probes and their armoury of cameras had all been as fascinated and entranced by it as I was. Each time a new probe had arrived in martian orbit its techs and controllers had obviously thought it was a Worthy Target For their cameras, too. No wonder the HiRISE team had decided to turn their great spy satellite's eagle eyes on it like they did...

And so, full circle, back to MRO, and back to the image that had started off my quest in the first place: PSP_005543_1725. Now I was able to look at it with fresh, even more appreciative eyes, and drink in the full dramatic view - before I noticed a link to a false colour crop of the image, showing the central third of the crater from top to bottom. Click. Oh my...

Suddenly, even though it was painted in garish false colour, New Crater was a real place. Even coloured distinctly un-martian blue and green and god-knows-what-that-colour-is, the crater was a geological wonderland. It took me just five minutes to import the false colour image into my image processing program and, using the level, hue and saturation adjustments I found after weeks of trial and error, convert its false colours into something much more natural, much more, well, martian.

Now it was painted in golds, browns and ochre. Now its floor and slopes and walls actually looked like they were made of rocks and not painted MDF, and the layers of stone exposed in the chasm wall had the same earthy tones as the layers seen in Victoria Crater and the Columbia Hills by the Rovers Which Need Not Be Named -

Then I noticed the links to "Wallpapers" on the page, and immediately went for the largest, hoping to pull even more detail out of the image. What came up on my screen took my breath away - a false colour section of the layering exposed on the crater's crumbling southern edge, in so much detail that individual boulders could be seen protruding out of the chasm wall. Some were even visible halfway down the slope, having fallen out of the layers and tumbled away, sliding down through the dust, ploughing through it before rolling to a halt. Magical.

Again, a few moments' "manipulating" transformed it into a natural colour view of what could easily have been a scene from the Grand Canyon.

Looking at my crudely and absolutely inexpertly-colourised image of a crater I hadn't even known existed a few days earlier, a crater that had been imaged by every spaceprobe orbiter despatched to Mars since the days of flared trousers, Saturday Night Fever and Skylab, I felt like I was seeing Mars in a whole new light, as if I'd somehow discovered a whole new wavelength of light. And not for the first time I felt, in here, that I had been born on the wrong planet, in the wrong millennium, the wrong Time, that really I should have been born in a small Hab on Mars in a hundred years' time, the bawling baby of a family of settlers or colonists, and that my childhood should have been spent exploring not the green hills and gurgling streams of Cumbria but the dust, boulder-strewn plains and crumbling chasms and canyons of Mars...

You think that's melodramatic? Over the top? Okay. Look at that Viking image... just think about what you're seeing... try and imagine what it would have been like to stand down there, on the floor of Ganges Chasma, and seeing a huge section of the southern wall just drop away, slumping like a demolished building, falling to the valley floor with a thunderous "WHUMP"... imagine feeling the ground tremble beneath your boots as the remains of the collapsed section spread out across the valley floor, a tsunami of stones, dust and boulders that rolled and roiled and tumbled for mile after mile after mile until hissing to a halt... Now imagine seeing the same thing happen on the opposite wall, the northern wall, but on a larger scale, with twice as much material shearing off the chasm wall and spreading out across the valley floor, heading towards the earlier landslide and then rolling OVER it, dwarfing it, boulders bouncing through the thin air like cars in a “destroyed city” scene from Armageddon or Independance Day...

Now tell me you don't wish you'd been born on such a world too...

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