Planet Four Talk

Sphere object

  • Farscope by Farscope

    There is a green small green sphere, can any one tell me what it might be it's not ice

    Posted

  • john_cooper_35hotmail.com by john_cooper_35hotmail.com

    I saw one of these and was advised is probably frost or a #badpixel

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  • Portyankina by Portyankina scientist

    It is most probably bad pixel in our red CCD. But I am intrigued to know what is your reason to think that it is not ice?

    Anya

    Posted

  • Farscope by Farscope

    This is definitely not frost there is no other areas in photo with frost and it is sphere in shape, strange

    Posted

  • michaelaye by michaelaye scientist

    ah, yes, that's one for the FAQ. Most of the images are actually covered by a translucent CO2 ice layer. This is just the way things are at the south pole of Mars during spring, coming from a 6 month winter. The atmosphere is more than 90 % CO2 and at the poles it gets easily enough to condense ice on the ground, so there's no way to avoid meter-thick ice layers on the ground.
    However, I believe we also put some data from the very late spring, early summer in the dataset. So you might be actually right in that this could be ice-free, but just by chance with some piece of ice left. (For thermal reasons, ice to be melting or sublimating usually is roundish at the very end, has to do with best energy conservation).
    Without ice, this image would, in absolute terms, be much darker than ice covered images. But, for the sake of fast identification of interesting things, our automatic image creation pipelines always stretch the contrast to the max, so we actually can not know if this is ice free, without looking at the meta-data, i.e. when it was taken and where.
    One thing assured: If there are clearly fans to be seen in an image, than the whole area is covered with a CO2 ice layer, even if you can't see it. There is just no other way the fans can come about and be visible like that. Plus, we checked with a spectrometer, and it sees CO2 😃
    So this green thing should be either a badpixel, but depending on the time in the season, it also could be some tiny remnant piece of CO2 ice.

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  • Farscope by Farscope in response to michaelaye's comment.

    Thank you for your answer, looking forward to FAQ, Should be interesting:-)

    Posted

  • Farscope by Farscope

    UFO

    Posted

  • Djbooth by Djbooth

    Maybe ice remnant in a tiny crater?

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  • michaelaye by michaelaye scientist in response to Djbooth's comment.

    possible!

    Posted

  • Farscope by Farscope

    Still it interesting nobody has clear answer

    Posted