For years,
children and readers of 16th and 17th century English
literature have fancied the notion of the Proverbs of John Heywood that claimed that “the moon is made of
a greene cheese.” Although the proverb
has been largely ignored for centuries, new explorations of surface sediment on
Mars have re-opened the controversy, albeit on a different celestial body. In this study, Greenman and Neila
describe observations
of slope angles and grain sorting trends from the Martian surface west of Caseus Rotula that suggest the presence
of noncohesive granular materials, like many granular
materials from the kitchen (e.g., coffee grinds and
Brazil nuts). These data were
integrated with data on ultrasonic velocity from sediment, which
illustrate that velocity of the Martian surface sediment average ~1600 m/s and
show temperature dependence---trends remarkably similar to published measurements
of Cheddar cheese (not green cheese, however). These sediments are interpreted to reflect a primal Martian crust source (there's "cheese in the crust"?), perhaps
generated as impact ejecta de brie.
Sedimentology,
geomorphology, and ultrasonic velocity of Martian surface sediment, Caseus
Rotula: Implications for Martian crustal
composition by L.T.L.
Greenman, and I. A. Neila
No comments:
Post a Comment