Astronomers Just Discovered a Morse Code Message in the Dunes of Mars
NASA has spotted a series of strange, dark dunes on Mars that look uncannily like the dots and dashes that make up Morse code.
This isn’t the first time researchers have spotted this pattern in the sands of Mars, but thanks to its unique topography, this dune field – just south of the planet’s north pole – shows them in clearer detail than usual, allowing scientists to translate the message for the first time.
NASA:
This image of dark dunes on Mars was taken on Feb. 6, 2016, at 15:16 local Mars time by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These dunes are influenced by local topography. The shape and orientation of dunes can usually tell us about wind direction, but in this image, the dune-forms are very complex, so it’s difficult to know the wind direction.
However, a circular depression (probably an old and infilled impact crater) has limited the amount of sand available for dune formation and influenced local winds. As a result, the dunes here form distinct dots and dashes. The “dashes” are linear dunes formed by bi-directional winds, which are not traveling parallel to the dune. Instead, the combined effect of winds from two directions at right angles to the dunes, funnels material into a linear shape. The smaller “dots” (called “barchanoid dunes”) occur where there is some interruption to the process forming those linear dunes. This process is not well understood at present and is one motivation for HiRISE to image this area.
The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
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Source: NASA
