[X] My Assistant

[SigurRosFan]

- Light-toned Rock

MGS MOC Release No. MOC2-1329, 1 January 2006

[CosmicRocker]

I can remember the first images of Mars to come back from a spacecraft, though I forget which one. As a kid who was keenly interested in all of the science returns of the early space programs, I eagerly awaited the pictures to show up on the front page of the newspaper. I also remember being a bit disappointed to see so many craters, and a surface that sort of resembled the moon. It's interesting to note how increasing resolutions and better spectral data have changed that view over time. The better we can see, the more interesting this place (and I guess, any place) becomes.

Now that we have the rovers with their superhuman eyes to put the improving orbiter images into perspective, things are really interesting. That image reminded me of how often I yearn to see Meridiani blown free of its concealing drifts of sand and dust. I think it would be an amazing sight to see, with many of its secrets revealed.

[dvandorn]

...It's interesting to note how increasing resolutions and better spectral data have changed that view over time. The better we can see, the more interesting this place (and I guess, any place) becomes...

While increasing levels of resolution are satisfying, I'd like to repeat Wilhelms' Caution, here. Which is that, in the heady days of lunar exploration of the 1960s and 1970s, the push for greater and greater resolutions of lunar vistas led to a steadily *worsening* understanding of the processes that shaped lunar evolution. Ground conditions can become coated with ubiquitous features -- regoliths, dust covers, cratering densities -- that make surfaces created by far different processes look very alike on fine scales. Wilhelms comes to the conclusion that, especially for the Moon, lower resolutions and larger scales provide better clues to the large-scale impact processes that shaped our companion world.

While Mars is a different animal than the Moon, the same rules tend to apply. For example, on Mars, water- and air-driven erosion has distributed a poorly sorted covering of dust and rocks over underlying terrain features, making the fine details of the surface layer less than representative of the underlying units.

In terms of spectral data, yes -- we've yet to come across a high-resolution limit at which we learn less and less about the processes that formed the rock in the first place. But since Mars has redistributed it surface quite a bit over time, fine spectral resolution doesn't ensure that you're seeing information about the composition of the underlying units, either.

-the other Doug