♥ This week, on March 3th, the world received important news from the Red Planet – Mars. A NASA spacecraft in orbit around Mars Planet, took on Feb. 19th the first ever images of active avalanches near the Mars Planet’s North Pole. The images show tan clouds billowing away from the foot of a towering slope, where the ice and dust have just cascaded down.Ingrid Daubar Spitale of the University of Arizona, Tucson, who works on targeting the camera and has studied hundreds of HiRISE images, was the first person to notice the avalanches - "It really surprised me", "It's great to see something so dynamic on Mars. A lot of what we see there hasn't changed for millions of years."
According with Candice Hansen, deputy principal investigator for HiRISE, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif, "We were checking for springtime changes in the carbon-dioxide frost covering a dune field, and finding the avalanches was completely serendipitous".
And Patrick Russell from the University of Berne, Switzerland, a HiRISE team collaborator said "We don't know what set off these landslides. We plan to take more images of the site through the changing Martian seasons to see if this kind of avalanche happens all year or is restricted to early spring."
More ice than dust probably makes up the material that fell from the upper portion of the scarp. Imaging of the site during coming months will track any changes in the new deposit at the base of the slope. That will help researchers estimate what proportion is ice.
And here, on Earth, we will be waiting for others news from Mars Planet.
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