Channel and Fan in Lyot Crater
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona
Channel and Fan in Lyot Crater
ESP_019372_2300  Science Theme: Climate Change
Extensive flow of liquid water across the surface of Mars is generally constrained to the first billion years of the planet’s evolution. There are some specific places, however, where liquid water may have been stable later in the planet’s history, when Mars is considered to have been cold and dry. Lyot Crater is one of those places.

Lyot Crater is a “peak-ring basin” that formed in the lowlands of the Northern Hemisphere of Mars, making it the lowest topographic point there. Additionally, we know that the Lyot impact event occurred after the most significant era of fluvial activity on Mars, so any features observed in Lyot were formed after that era as well.

This observation shows what appears to be a very unusual fan of material that is sourced by a valley that extends upslope for almost 50 kilometers along the floor of Lyot Crater (top-right of the full image). The fan is not fresh, so this activity pre-dates the Martian gullies (a few of which can be seen at the top of this image). The fan has been mantled by smooth material which has been removed in some areas and fractured in others. This makes it difficult to tell what the fan looked like when it was originally emplaced.

Lyot Crater is found in a region of Mars that is thought to host many debris-covered glaciers (some of which are found within Lyot itself) and ice-rich mantling units. These could provide potential sources of water that, under conditions slightly more favorable than those of today, could melt and create features like we see here.

Written by: Jay Dickson (Brown University)  (3 November 2010)

This is a stereo pair with ESP_024831_2300.
 
Acquisition date
13 September 2010

Local Mars time
15:31

Latitude (centered)
49.669°

Longitude (East)
30.819°

Spacecraft altitude
306.3 km (190.4 miles)

Original image scale range
32.5 cm/pixel (with 1 x 1 binning) so objects ~98 cm across are resolved

Map projected scale
25 cm/pixel and North is up

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Equirectangular

Emission angle
20.6°

Phase angle
37.2°

Solar incidence angle
57°, with the Sun about 33° above the horizon

Solar longitude
148.0°, Northern Summer

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North azimuth:  95°
Sub-solar azimuth:  341.7°
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POSTSCRIPT
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The HiRISE camera was built by Ball Aerospace and Technology Corporation and is operated by the University of Arizona.