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The Planetary Society BlogBy Emily LakdawallaUnbelievably spectacular flight through Candor ChasmaMar. 9, 2010 | 12:53 PST | 20:53 UTC
This is one of the things that came out during LPSC last week and all I could do at the time was Tweet it, which doesn't serve most of my readers, I realize. So here it is in blog form: the most unbelievably spectacular 3D animation of a bit of Mars I've seen yet, produced by Adrian Lark. The flight takes us through part of Candor Chasma, one of the largest sub-canyons in the Valles Marineris complex. I've embedded it here at low definition; visit Adrian's Youtube channel to see it in all its high-definition glory. There is no vertical exaggeration. The unbelievablest (to coin a word) thing about this animation is the fact that it is generated in real time, like a video game! No overnight rendering required.
Candor Chasma animation using HiRISE Digital Terrain Model 3D data: NASA / JPL / UA; animation: Adrian Lark, Mars3D.com This is an amazing landscape of pyramidal hills and racetracks made of eroded, folded rocks. Wow. If you're wondering about the scale of things, Adrian says the camera is flying very roughly 100 meters above the ground at about 160 kilometers per hour, or, as Doug Ellison put it, "Think local news chopper on a car chase." (That would be a pretty low-flying chopper, but that is the appropriate vehicle for the speed involved, I think.) Here's a cartoon showing the approximate flight path.
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I'm a teacher of geology and astronomy, with a background in structural geology, a bit like Mrs. Lakdawalla, and there's something in this data that immediately grabs me by the throat! There are outcrop patterns of plunging folds!
It would take a whole blog-length post to explain what that means, but basically it's something that I, at least, have never seen in a Mars image before. Mars is wonderful, but to a structure /tectonics person, it's always been a bit of a snore. Yes, the Valles Marineris is a very spectacular example of crustal extension, but the overall complexity and diversity of structural geology on Mars is very limited compared to the Earth, due to the lack of Martian plate tectonics.
And while these folds certainly don't indicated a `folded mountain belt' like we have on the Earth (they're in Candor, after all), it's still wonderfully gratifying to see them. The outcrop patterns of plunging folds are some of the most beautiful things the Earth shows, IMO, and it's just very satisfying to see them on Mars, even in a limited area.
The dips look pretty shallow - and perhaps there's some weird way that they could be horizontal - but they at least look like anticlines and synclines exposed by erosion. Neat!