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Massive Cave Found on Mars
mrcgran writes "Space.com is reporting a very deep hole found on Mars: 'The geological oddity measures some 330 feet (100 meters) across and is located on an otherwise bright dusty lava plain to the northeast of Arsia Mons, one of the four giant Tharsis volcanoes on the red planet. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) used its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) instrument to draw a bead on the apparent deep hole — a feature that may cause more scientists to ponder about potential subsurface biology on Mars. Because the spot lacks a raised rim or tossed out material called ejecta, researchers have ruled out the pit being an impact crater. No walls or other details can be seen inside the hole, and so any possible walls might be perfectly vertical and extremely dark or — more likely — overhanging.' The original image and its cutout at full resolution can be found in the HiRISE site."
That's no cave! It a giant pool of Purity.
:-)
Seriously though, the absolute absence of albedo in the visible spectrum is stunning. I wonder if there are multi-spectral images of this site? I expect this location will be of intense study in the future as there is little more than a complete absence of something to stir the human imagination.
However, I have to disagree with the analysis in that you can see shallow walls at the very edges of the crater if you stretch the image some and examine the profiles. It also appears to match the brightness of the elevation changes from one rim of the hole to the other which should give some idea for how tall the lip of the hole is to where the "blackness" starts presuming they know the angle of the sun and lat and long. Depending upon how far up the sun can get in the sky at a different season, there may be a possibility of seeing further into the hole, presuming of course it is not a giant pool of Purity....
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"A very dark spot on [Uranus] could be an entrance to a deep hole or cavern, according to scientists studying imagery taken by NASA's a...ss Orbiter. The geological oddity measures some 330 feet (100 meters) across... The hole might be the sort of place that could support life or serve as a habitat... Must be deep..."
Marvin the Martian would be very angry if we found his hidden cave...
Verrrry angry indeed...
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[Time Lapse. They reach a cliff and look over the edge.]
Zapp: Behold: The Great Stone Face of Mars.
Fry: Hm.
Zapp: The only known entrance to the Martian reservation.
Leela: What about the Great Stone Ass of Mars?
Zapp: Well, yeah, but it's way over the other side of the planet.
-- Futurama, Where the buggalo roam
It's the planet drain hole? That's why they all died off because some knucklehead pulled the plug.
And they call themselves scientists.
$10 says it's a bug on the lens.
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It's the subsurface cannon barrel they used to fire their cylinders to invade Earth in 1898, 1938, and 1953. They may be readying for another attempt! When is the next opposition?
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There is so much to know about Mars that we don't.
No light is reflected back, which is kind of spooky. What can be inferred about the depth? How deep would it have to be for the HiRES camera stop sensing the light that is reflected?
It's nice and round, that's unusual. There is no crater ejecta so I'm guessing nothing hit it. I'm not a geologist, but aren't giant round holes in otherwise homogeneous flat terrain a bit uncommon?
Is there any radar in orbit with enough resolution to bounce a signal down one of these? I'm just so full of questions and awe.
I'll be checking unmanned spaceflight for theories to these questions. Awesome site.
the first colonization site
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If you read the preprint (PDF), you'd note that luckily, one of the caves actually was imaged with the floor sunlit, giving the authors the ability to calculate the depth of that particular cave. This was covered on May 23rd on the Planetary Society blog.
There's a log in the hole in the bottom of Mars There's a log in the hole in the bottom of Mars There's a log, there's a log There's a log in the hole in the bottom of Mars. There's a branch on the log in the hole in the bottom of Mars There's a branch on the log in the hole in the bottom of Mars There's a branch, there's a branch There's a branch on the log in the hole in the bottom of Mars.
At last we have the answer to the burning question: Is there a hole on mars?
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Does this mean men are from Venus and women are from Mars?
I guess that's what happens when you leave the door to Mount Doom unlocked :)
Kythe
To me this is exciting. Imagine, hundreds of years from now this cavern may be visited by our descendants, and they will probably be just as crazy as we are today and thus will do things like this.
Ah, the future. I really want to stick around to see as much of it as possible!
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The article says that the lack of ejected material rules out an impact, but it certainly does not rule out an impact into the roof of a dome (likely a lava-formed dome given the material)... whether from space or from a volcano (any within several miles?). There'd be little to no kick-back of debris if it simply punhced through.
It could be a structural collapse, but it's awfuly round.
Does this make anyone else think of Alpha Centauri? Thermal boreholes give lots of energy, but they raise temperatures in the surrounding 8 sectors - not necessarily a bad thing on Mars.
I don't see any roads, farms, mines or solar collectors, though. You're never going to grow the colony and win the game without farm sectors.
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From the summary: "No walls or other details can be seen inside the hole, and so any possible walls might be perfectly vertical and extremely dark or -- more likely -- overhanging."
If you look at the image more carefully, you can clearly see shades and highlights that suggest the terrain slopes into the hole all around. That pretty much excludes equipment faults. One possible theory is that the cavern is conical in shape, getting wider as it goes down, which would certainly explain why it's so dark.
Also remember this picture is taken from a satellite. I'm sure they'll be taking more as soon as they get an opportunity.
=Smidge=
Y'know, if the UAC would follow a few simply rules of planetary colonization, they wouldn't have such problems.
1) When your life depends on the structural integrity of your base/space station, keep it well lit. Dark corners and unlit passageways invite unobserved problems and make excellent hiding places for demonic hordes.
2) Emergency lighting is your friend. Self-contained lights that can run off batteries for days have existed since the 20th century. USE THEM.
3) Teach your space marines how to use a pistol and flashlight at the same time. Television actors pretending to be cops can do it, so can they.
4) Keep hidden compartments, passageways, and crawlspaces to a minimum. This will drastically reduce construction and maintenance costs by keeping the design simple, and make it far easier for a lone marine to save all of humanity.
5) Develop lockdown procedures. They're useful in the event of a sudden loss of pressure to prevent your entire base from leaking air out a single fracture. They can also come in handy when your absurd experiments fail and you find yourself surrounded by blood-thirsty monsters. Seal all the doors. Combine this with #4 so that they can't simply bypass the doors by crawling through unnecessarily large ventilation shafts or open ceilings.
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Given the fact that it's on the side of a volcano, and the fact that it's in the middle of a lava field, the most likely answer is that it opens into a lava tube. Most likely a small meteorite hit the center of the circle and caused a circular fracture that fell into the underlying tube.
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It could be full of Beagle! Was that Metric or English...
Clearly it's the vacated home of the Asteroid Worm in Star Wars: Episode V. He couldn't afford the rent anymore.
Cheers.
Mark
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Martian atmosphere is about 1% of the density we prefer (~1 Bar).
To increase the pressure to a survivable few 100 mBar would require several kilometers...
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How can a hole in the ground be 'massive'?
"The hole is almost perfectly circular, over 1,000 feet across and 400 feet deep. It was formed as a limestone cave system during the last ice age when sea levels were much lower. As the ocean began to rise again the caves flooded, and the roof collapsed."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Blue_Hole
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There's a hole in my planet, dear NASA, a hole.
Then fill it, dear Martian, dear Martian,
Then fill it, dear Martion, fill it.
With what shall I fill it, dear NASA, dear NASA,
With what shall I fill it, dear NASA, with what?
With crashed space probes, dear Martian, dear Martian,
With crashed space probes, dear Martian, space probes.
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Clearly this is Martian Censorship. The Martians are preventing the disclosure of sensitive locations so that they aren't published on Google Mars.
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Lots of things form caves. Limestone caverns are caused by acidic water leeching through the soil and eating away at the substrate. We know that parts of Mars were once covered with seas as acidic as acid mine ponds, so that seems a reasonable possibility.
There are also lava tubes all over the planet, although that would be one monstrous lava tube.
Nothing says 'welcome to the neighborhood' like a gunny sack full of dead squirrels.
At this point, as far as I can tell, there are a huge number of possibilities and no information to distinguish between them.
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My first though was that it looked like a cenote. They are built from limestone though so it would have to be by a different mechanism. My other thought was it might be a lava tube or a volcanic neck where the magma settled back out. I'm surprised that it hasn't been filled in by millennia of blowing sand so it must be rather young or constantly kept clear somehow. Maybe it is an alien portal and the hollow earth people got it right but for the wrong planet.
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So that's where Mel's Hole went!
I mean, people with big holes shout all the time.
He starts the article with an anecdote mentioning how he once mentioned the planet 'yoo-RAY-nus' to someone only to be corrected. After checking the dictionary (he doesn't mention which one), he learned that the correct pronunciation was 'YOO-rih-nus'.
This essay is reprinted in 1988 in the anthology "The Relativity of Wrong", Pinnacle Books, ISBN 1-55817-169-X
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
The black part is not pure black, actually. There appears to be some structure inside the hole.
I ran the HiRISE cut-out image through photoshop (using a stark black-white striped image gradient) and some structure appears to come out in the black region. It's way down on one side of the color spectrum, but I'm able to see about 4 layers of gradient in the black. Perhaps a professional image analysis could bring out more.
With my limited imaging experience (undergrad astrophysics) it doesn't seem to me like the data that comes out is merely random instrument noise. It looks sort of like broad hilly terrain variations of a scale size similar to those outside the hole.
Here is the original image from HiRISE site.
And here is the enhanced color version that I got by using a high contrast color gradient in photoshop.
That stuff at the bottom looks like lumpy ground a lot like what's outside of the hole.
I bet a high fidelity image enhancement of the original data could bring out a lot more detail though. There's probably already someone doing a paper on it as we speak.
-b
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