Look out below...!

A decade or so ago, Mars had something of a reputation as a "dead world". Apart from at those times when the huge dust storms rose up and engulfed the planet, books and magazines told us, nothing happened there. The winds were light, erosional processes were slower than a dinosaur walking through tar, and the landscape of rocks and boulders seen on the images returned by the "plucky little Sojourner rover" as it trundled around Pathfinder's landing site in Ares Valles had looked that way for tens if not hundreds of millions of years.

But since then our view of Mars has changed, dramatically. Orbiting spaceprobes like Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Reconaissance Orbiter have photographed dust devils - mini tornadoes that whip and whirl and skip and twirl across Mars, rising high into the air like cobras and leaving dark trails across the dusty ground behind them. We've seen fresh gullies inside craters at various places across the planet, and tracks of boulders that have rolled down slopes. We've begun to realise that, perhaps, Mars wasn't so dead and lifeless after all.

Most dramatic of all have been the changes observed at the planet's poles, where the results of the thawing of ice layers both on and beneath the surface have been caught by MRO's revolutionary HiRISE camera. Searching the Gallery on the HiRISE website will reward you with pictures of bizarre patterns on the polar ice cap caused by the ice there melting and subliming...

Other galleries show the incredible polar "geysers" or "fountains" - dark fans and blows of material that has gushed up out of the ground, propelled by pockets of carbon dioxide gas lurking beneath the surface.

Like many people, I thought that was as "active" as Mars was going to get.

How wrong we were.

Yesterday some new HiRISE images were released, without much fanfare as is usually the case, and Mars enthusiasts and space buffs alike went nuts about them straight away. These images show what appear to be avalanches of material falling from the steep slopes that mark the edhge of the north polar ice cap and spreading out across the plain far below in billowing clouds.

Yes, you read that right - avalanches. Avalanches on Mars, Barsoom, the dead world where nothing ever happens!

I colourised one of them to make it look more, well, martian, and this is what I got...

Today, the images are everywhere you look online. Each space news website, each online news agency, each sci mag website is featuring them. The mainstream media are even starting to pick up the story and run with it, too. I think it's safe to say that these images might be the most widely circulated and seen HiRISE images for years, certainly since the famous "Opportunity at Victoria Crater" was released into the wild all those months ago.

But why? Why have these images struck a chord with the media, when others, showing much more dramatic features and landscapes and terrain, have been ignored?

I think it's because as fascinating as they are to space enthusiasts, and as interesting as they are to planetary scientists, these images are also exciting to the man or woman in the street because they DON'T look martian. They don't look alien, exotic or "spacey", for want of a better word. let's face it, many HiRISE images are hard to appreciate or interpret for non-space people; the incredibly detailed images of layering within crater or canyon walls, wind-sculpted polar dust dunes thawing in the low winter sun and pancake-stack sedimentary layers might have people like me rubbing our hands with glee, and leave University-educated scientists drooling over their keyboards because of their perfect textbook illustration of complicated processes and phenomena, but they mean absolutely nothing to people who don't have at least a basic grasp and understanding of geology. I could stare into one of the MER panoramas of Victoria Crater or Home Plate for hours, drinking in every rippled dust dune and every wind-etched boulder, but to people who aren't "into space" they're pictures of rocks, just rocks.That crater I was ranting on about a week or so ago - the one being eaten away by the gradual erosion of the canyon it sits on the edge of - might be a window into Mars' past for me, and other people reading this blog, but to people without an interest in astronomy it's just a hole. Big deal.

Ah, but these new images are different. They look... familiar. They're easier to appreciate. They simply show, if you look at them from the point of view of a non space enthusiast, a steep rock wall, a rocky floor at its base, and something falling down that slope and onto and across that floor - an avalanche, or landslde, or something like that. And that's not new. They've seen that kind of thing before, either in person, whilst walking or hiking or skiing, or on TV, on the Discovery or National Geographic channel. They can identify with the idea of rocks and dirt falling off a cliff, bouncing and tumbling down it, and then spreading out across the ground below. They can imagine standing on top of the cliff and looking down on the avalanche from above, just as they can imagine standing at the base of the cliff and watching the rocks and dirt falling towards them...

That's why I think these images are proving so fascinating, and why they have been picked up by the news media when so many haven't been. Imagine you're a news editor, deciding which pictures to show on your TV news program or on your website. You see hundreds if not thousands of images every day, and have to pick the ones you use very carefully. They have to be something special. When this image is given to you, it doesn't look like anything to waste your precious time on. It's a landslide off a red rocky cliff, so what? But when you realise that it was taken by a spaceprobe orbiting Mars, that you're looking at a landslide or avalanche on another planet, then it comes to life. You've heard about Mars before... it's that planet with red rocks everywhere, right? And there are two robots driving around there, right? Oh, and wasn't there a photo of a huge face or something? That's all you know because Mars has never seemed real to you somehow. It's not part of your everyday life, it's a place for spacemad internet geeks and those boffins at NASA, not for real, everyday people.

But look at that... Suddenly Mars seems less abstract and more real, it becomes a physical place where cliffs fall apart, rocks bounce, and you can get hurt if you are daft enough to get in their way.

And that's why I think these pictures are actually important. They show us Mars as a real place, a world, where things happen, where there are things for people like you and me to see and experience. It's not just a dead wasteland of red rocks beneath a pink sky; it's a place where you can watch the sides of ancient, ice-capped cliffs collapse and crumble, showering the ground below with rocks and dust; a place where you can feel the ground trembling beneath your feet as boulders crash into it from high above, bouncing up out of and cartwheeling towards you through a tsunami of fine cinnamon-hued dust.

In years to come, I'm sure, these images will be hailed as "Classics" of the Space Age. They'll come to represent Mars - or at least this area of it - in the same way that Mimas "is" that Voyager image of Herschel crater, Iapetus "is" that Cassini image of the Voyager Mountains and Miranda "is" that image of the Verone Rupes cliffs taken by Voyager 2. Yet again HiRISE has given us a spectacular view of a spectacular place on a spectacular world.

What will it show us next..?

Of course, I couldn't resist writing something a little more, well, poetic about these images...

LOOK OUT BELOW

Strange to think a single rose-pink snowflake

floating from the frigid polar sky could have been

the start. Settling on the silent ice as softly as a sigh,

pressing on the white-capped scarp just hard

enough to send a tickle of a tremor

through its gateau-like layers of rock

it shocked the sleeping stones awake,

setting them shivering and quivering justenough

to shake loose a crust of ochre-dusted snow

and send it tumbling to the world below,

blossoming into powder puffs as it scuffed

each ledge and boulder on the way,

spraying veils of flour-fine ice into the

vacuum-thin air before crumping

into the polar plain and billowing away

from the high cliff’s crumbling base…

Imagine walking in the Great Wall shadow

of that scarp; delighting in the flint-sharp polar light,

rejoicing in the silence, relishing the peace

when suddenly the ground beneath your feet

begins to quake, and looking up

you see snow flaking off the cliff. Soon rocks and grit

a thousand shades of pink and red

are falling from the sky – a dry waterfall

of icing sugar frost and pollen-fine dust,

rushing through the air to strike the ground

without a sound in a martian mare’s tail cloud

of tan and titian fines that huffs and puffs

towards you, a slow-motion Barsoomian tsunami

as weak as the beating of a faerie’s wing…

Such sights our eyes will never see,

and I cannot help but envy those who, in the future, do.

Written by stuartatk Blog about this entry

This entry has 1 comments: (Add your own)

#1 Comment from memes121
3/4/08 2:35 PM | Permalink

Very cool! Tammy

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