Solving the Mystery of Mars

Reported July 2009

TUCSON, Ariz. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- It has mountains, canals and deserts, yet we know that Mars is as much unlike our earth as it is similar. Now, science may be a step closer to understanding the red planet. New secrets are revealed about the planet's surface that may help us better understand Mars itself.

From silly … to serious, the mysteries of mars make us wonder: What's really going on up there? For Jon Pelletier, Ph.D., a geomorphologist at the University of Arizona, it was Martian rocks that sparked his curiosity.

"When the Martian rovers were first taking their pictures and they were coming back down to earth, we saw these ordered configurations of stones," Dr. Pelletier told Ivanhoe.

Scientists once thought extreme windstorms picked up the stones or pushed them, but it may actually be just the opposite.

"We found that the stone actually rolls into the wind, which is certainly not something we first expected," Pelletier explained.

When winds blow around a stone, sand is deposited behind it and taken away on the other side, a process that repeats itself again and again.

"That change in the local slope causes, over time, the stones to migrate or move into the void that is formed by the erosion of the sand." Pelletier described.

Over time, clusters of stones move and eventually settle into more ordered patterns -- patterns we now see on the Martian surface. We're far from answering all our questions about Mars, but with every discovery, science is one step closer to solving the mystery.

Not only did Dr. Pelletier's research solve a mystery about Mars, he also helped answer some questions about our own planet. It turns out the same process that moves rocks around on Mars is changing the surface of the deserts here on Earth.

The American Geophysical Union contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Jon D. Pelletier
Tucson, Arizona
(520) 626-2126
jdpellet@email.arizona.edu

Peter Weiss
American Geophysical Union
Washington, DC 20009-1277
(800) 966-2481
http://www.agu.org
pweiss@agu.org

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