Sunday, June 11, 2006
Introduction
As participants in the Mars Student Imaging Project, we, the members of our Mars group (Taylor, Aaron, and Travis) were more interested in studying the Channels and really determined to find an answer to our class question. We were interested in Channels because they can be formed on Earth by water and we were thinking that Mars might have had water on the planet at one time. This would be a good discovery.
The question we hope to answer is: Do all channels on Mars lead away from craters and into basins? We think this question is important. The north part of Mars may have had been a large body of water at one point, and channels might have drained into it. There are many more reasons this question is important.
To prepare for our research, we had demonstrations by people from EIU and we watched movies about Mars. We also used the THEMIS website information, we analyzed the pictures taken by the cameras, and compared them to the images we got back from THEMIS. We participated in the teleconference with Dr. Josh Bandfield; we got to ask questions relevant to our topic. We did lots of things to get our information.
While some Channels on the surface of Mars are believed to have been formed by running water, streams of ice may have carved others. Channels in one region of Mars share a number of characteristics with those created by ice streams that flow beneath Antarcticaıs surface on Earth and empty into the surrounding ocean.
When our THEMIS taken image was presented to us, we used a program to show fine lines and just really got a very good look at the image. Our image was of Valles Marineris Region the Latitude is -8,77N and the Longitude is 279.58E. We came to the conclusion that our pictures werenıt big enough to actually tell if they all go from craters to basins.
We concluded, channels occur in region of Mars as a result of water erosion. Some are as large as sixty miles wide and over one thousand miles long. Enormous floods that rushed across the surface might have carved certain channels. Whatever water was present seemed to have escaped underground. Some Channels do not look like a river system.