Planet Four Talk

South polar plumes

  • p.titchin by p.titchin

    Ok folks, time for comments from P4 I think on the Mars South Polar plumes of 2012, now it is 'going viral' in the media. All 'chat ' comments welcome,. No one else has come up with explanations in the lasr 2 years. Shall us citizen scientists start a forum? We probably form the biggest number of interested parties on the science of the south polar region of Mars!!!

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  • wassock by wassock moderator

    My view is that it's too big to be one of our fans in motion. And from the image showing the plume and the dates (March and April 2012) it's in the middle of the Southern Winter.

    BUT the image bottom right in this lot is very interesting and seems tro come from the daylight region - anyone tracked down whereabouts this is? NB South is at the top!

    enter image description here

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  • Kitharode by Kitharode moderator

    Can't find any info on the location of these plumes. It would be good to know the lat/long of these objects to be sure. I did find this paper (below) which doesn't answer any questions about the plumes, but it might be useful to add to your library.

    http://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=A9mSs2Wsa.NUzRYABJpLBQx.;_ylu=X3oDMTByaDVva2FxBHNlYwNzcgRwb3MDMwRjb2xvA2lyMgR2dGlkAw--/RV=2/RE=1424219181/RO=10/RU=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gfdl.noaa.gov%2Fbibliography%2Frelated_files%2Ftoigo0201.pdf/RK=0/RS=qxx3kXq79ZXy9R0YER1xUT1cHoI-

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  • p.titchin by p.titchin in response to Kitharode's comment.

    Thanks guys, when I first started looking at these, (with some excitement), I hit an information wall, and to some extent, am glad there is no immediate flood of information on what has been around for a couple of years, and \(I think) is very pertinent to our P4 interests on the south polar area.. I think we need to keep pushing for info on this one. 😃 ~ Pete

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  • wassock by wassock moderator

    Hi Kith there's a Nature article which gives the lat and longitude and a location, Terra Cimmeria. But the latitude is given as -45 which doesn't sound too polar to me.

    http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature14162.html

    I tweeted HiRise to ask if there were any relevant ground images, they said not, and searching the image catalog for those vague co-ords doesn't turn up anything of the right date.

    Found several bits'n'bobs suggesting that it's some kind of aurora associated with known areas of magnetic anomolies

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  • mschwamb by mschwamb scientist, translator

    Hiya,

    This is indeed interesting. This New Scientist article gives a good summary.

    Cheers,

    ~Meg

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