by A mysterious pit on an ancient side volcano on Mars it has recently been excited about what it might reveal about the surface of the Red Planet. This is what that means.
First, the hole, which is only a few meters across, was actually imaged on August 15, 2022 by NASA. Mars Exploration Orbit, which was about 159 miles (256 kilometers) above the Martian surface at the time. This hole in the ground is not alone either. It is one of many that can be seen on cradles through large volcanoes in the Tharsis region of Mars. This particular lava flow hole is found on the extinct volcano Arsia Mons, and appears to be a vertical shaft. That raises a question: Is it just a narrow groove, or does it lead to a much larger and more significant cavity? Or, maybe it’s a deep, deep lava tube that formed underground long ago when the volcano was still active?
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There are several reasons why pits and caves on Mars are interesting. For one, they could provide shelter for future astronauts; because Mars is a thin atmosphere and there is no global magnetic field, it cannot block the radiation from space that way World does. As a result, the average radiation exposure on the Martian surface is 40 to 50 times greater than on Earth.
The other fascinating aspect of these pits is that they might not provide shelter for human astronauts; they may be of astrobiological interest in the sense that they may have been home to Martian life in the past – perhaps even today, if microbial life does indeed exist.
The presence of so-called craters on the flanks of volcanoes is a strong indication that they are probably related to volcanic activity on Mars. Lava channels can flow out of a volcano underground; when the volcano grows extinct, the channel empties. This leaves behind a long underground tube. We see such tubes not only on Mars, but also on the moon and on Earth.
Sometimes, if the crust is thin enough, the ceiling of these tubes collapses. If collapse occurs along the entire length of the tube, it creates a feature called a rille, which is a long trench commonly found on the moon and sometimes in other areas of Mars. If the ceiling of the tube collapses in small areas, however, we get pits similar to those shown on Arsia Mons. Planetary scientists also saw a hole chains on the flanks of Martian volcanoes, which are linear stretches of multiple pits that apparently follow the length of a lava tube.
How deep these pits go, however, is a mystery, and it is not yet known whether the pits open into a large cavity or are enclosed by a small cylindrical depression. Some Martian craters have been visualized when the sun is high enough in the sky to reveal the sides of the crater wall, suggesting that they are craters that go straight down the flanks of the volcano. This seems to suggest that these pits are unlikely to open into larger caves or tubes. If so, this would make them similar to the pit craters found on the volcanic mountains of Hawaii, which do not open up any more than are produced by material that has fallen out deeper underground, causing the above material under water.
However, moon pits have been shown to have boulder-strewn floors that appear to be the cause of a larger subterranean volume.
Pits can also be formed by tectonic stresses that break the earth’s surface, and this is less likely to lead to a larger cavity. And finally, one other – perhaps less likely – explanation is that these pits open up where underground rivers once flowed billions of years ago.
We can see a similar phenomenon on Earth, in the form of a geological feature called karst, which forms when limestone bedrock dissolves and weakens, creating pits and sinkholes that open up into groundwater fields. If that is the case on Mars, then, if ever the Red Planet life, those organisms may shelter in karsts. In fact, running water down the side of an active volcano would be warm, providing a perfect protective environment for life to thrive and survive.
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Still, this is all speculation at the moment. We’ll only have some concrete answers after future missions explore some of those pits. Although a rover that drives to the edge of a pit that would not be able to descend, an airborne mission similar to a NASA mission Helicopter ingenuitywho worked on Mars for three years before arriving established in January 2024 after damaging one of its rotor blades, it would be able to hover over and down into a hole to see what’s down there.
If these pits open into caves, they could become the landing site of choice for future manned missions to Mars that require astronauts to build a sheltered camp away from the relentless radiation of the earth.
