Friday, 1 April 2016

To better understand Martian geology, scientists make a cake

A close-up of Mount Sharp, a mound inside a crater whose formation was recently decoded by ...

When NASA's Viking spacecraft touched down on the surface of Mars in 1976, one of the geologic features it observed was massive mounds inside craters. More recently, the Curiosity Mars rover got up close with one of these mounds called Mount Sharp where it landed in 2012 inside the Gale Crater. It revealed that the base of the three-mile (4.8-km)-high mound was made from sediment carried by water, while the upper layers consisted of regolith deposited by wind. To find out just how such a mixed mound could be developed, researchers created a "crater layer cake" and they popped it in a wind tunnel.

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Category: Space

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from Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine http://ift.tt/1Ru5cIc

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