The neighborhood is a wild card, and moving there is bound to be expensive. But one of the best options for shelter when humans finally reach the red planet will be underground caves. These caves, exist in clusters on both the Earth and the moonis a natural buffer against the harsh conditions of Mars.
In a presentation this month At the US Geological Society Connects 2022 meeting in Denver, researchers pinpointed nine top cave candidates worthy of future exploration. All of these caves seem to span at least some distance underground, and they are close to landing sites accessible to a light aircraft.
Nicole Bardabelias, a geologist at the University of Arizona, says these structures could provide a respite in the challenging Martian environment. “Everything at the surface is subject to harsh radiation, maybe meteorite or meteorite bombardment and the temperature variation from day to night is really big,” she said.
To own the most sought-after property on Mars, Ms. Bardabelias and her colleagues consulted with Global Cave Candidate Directory on Mars. This summary, based on images collected by the above tools Mars Odyssey spaceships and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, an inventory of more than 1,000 candidate caves and other odd-looking features on Mars. (Consider this the first Martian multi-listing service.)
Just as any discerning homebuyer would filter search results on Zillow or StreetEasy, the researchers narrowed down the category by imposing two criteria. First, they asked for a cave located about 60 miles from the appropriate spacecraft landing site. Second, they stipulate that there must be high resolution images.
Bardabelias and her colleagues identified a suitable landing site as one about 3,300 feet below altitude. Such relatively low positions are favorable landing sites because they give spacecraft more time to slow down as they pass through Mars’ thin atmosphereMrs. Bardabelias said.
“Mars has just enough atmosphere that you can’t reduce it, but not enough to really give you a significant amount of atmosphere,” she said, referring to using a planet’s atmosphere. to slow down an oncoming spaceship. “If you don’t have enough space between the time you hit the top of the atmosphere and where you plan to land, it will be very, very difficult for you to execute the correct entry, landing and landing sequence.”
The team also required that the top shelf image be available to each cave candidate. Until the brokers took over from NASA Mars Helicopter for real estate photography on Mars, that honor goes to HiRISE, or High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Bardabelias is the principal operations engineer for HiRISE, which is able to recognize features on Mars as small as 3 feet across but has so far captured less than 5% of the planet’s surface.
There were 139 caves that apparently met the team’s criteria, and Ms. Bardabelias and her colleagues examined images of each cave manually. After ignoring features such as the bridge-shaped rock formation that was clearly not a cave, the team analyzed the remaining pit-like features. The researchers focused only on those that appeared to span some distance underground, which yielded a sample of the top nine cave candidates.
These potential caves, the largest with holes that could swallow a football field, are all worth a closer look, Ms. Bardabelias said. But there is not rovers are currently active on Mars close enough to explore any of these caves, so that mission, for now, falls on a spacecraft orbiting the red planet. Further images of HiRISE taken from different angles and in different lighting conditions will reveal new details about these caves, Ms. Bardabelias said. You can help HiRISE team decide what to take next photo by voting for your favorite cave.
It is fitting that we Search caves again for shelter Glen Cushing, a space scientist in the Center for Astronomical Geosciences at the US Geological Survey and creator of the Global Mars Cave Candidate Catalog, was not involved in the study. said. “That brings us back to the dawn of humanity.”
