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| Coils from Mars, cheaper A* T-shirts =o | May 18, 2012 2:18 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:A tweet tipped me off to this article about funny coil patterns found by an Arizona State graduate student looking through high resolution photos sent back by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter via its HiRISE camera ("High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment"), "built under the direction of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp." Student Andrew Ryan has counted "about 269 of these lava coils just in one region on Mars, Cerberus Palus":
image by NASA/JPL/University of Arizona (source)
So yeah they're thought to be patterns of dried lava; such coil patterns occur here on Earth, on the surface of lava floes on the island of Hawai'i. Says Ryan: "The coils form on flows where there’s a shear stress – where flows move past each other at different speeds or in different directions." The Martian lava coils are bigger than terrestrial ones; the largest found on Mars so far has been about 30 meters / 100 feet across (neither the article nor Wikipedia will tell me how big Hawai'ian ones get, though :P). That photo above covers an area about 500 meters across ("1640 feet").
HiRISE, incidentally, is a pretty powerful camera: weighing 64.2 kg, it consists of "a 0.5 m (19.7 in) aperture reflecting telescope, the largest so far of any deep space mission, which allows it to take pictures of Mars with resolutions of 0.3 m/pixel (about 1 foot), resolving objects below a meter across." And it turned around and took this pretty keen photo of Earth and its Moon from the orbit of Mars in 2007 (it had achieved Martian orbit in March 2006):
image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona (source)
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A* T-shirts are more affordable than ever! Well okay I've only got the nice minimalistic A* logo T-shirt in the A* store, but it is now a spiffy $16, down from $18. $14.40 of that $16 goes to the print-on-demand T-shirt manufacturer, so eh I guess you don't have to worry about me retiring on T-shirt profits any time soon ;). Anyway I was looking at it because I'm thinking of adding some more T-shirt designs, and I'll want to order them first to make sure they come out right, and I didn't want to have to pay $18 per shirt, even if some of it would work its way back to me eventually (in theory) :P. So yeah, (relatively) cheap T-shirts! Take that, internet! I'll let you know when the new designs are up, of course--probably be a week or two before I can get the prototypes shipped to me so I can check 'em over.
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