NASA Orbiter Finds Possible Entrances to Underground Caves on Mars

The latest photos from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft have given the researches a bit of a puzzle. The spacecraft has discovered what appears to entrances to seven possible caves. They are on the slope of a Martian volcano, and the discovery is sparking interest in the possibility of there being potential underground habitats, so much so that they are planing to look for similar strictures in other areas on the planet.

What they have found are very dark, almost perfect circles ranging in seize from 100 meters, 328 feet, to 250 meters, 820 feet. The pictures were taken by NASA's Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor orbiters. They used Odyssey's infrared camera to check the circles day and night temperature and this led the scientists to conclude that they could be the windows to underground spaces.

The reason why the temperatures led to this conclusion comes from the differences in the temperatures they spotted in the inferred images between the afternoon pictures and the pre dawn ones. The temperatures in of the holes hardly changed at all, only about 1/3 as much of a change that occurred in the surrounding ground surface. They were cooler during the day and warmer at night. This is not as steady as caves on earth, but it is consistent with being large, deep holes in the ground.

No matter if they are just deep shafts that go straight down or are actually opening into spacious caverns, they are still entrances to the Martian underground. Somewhere on Mars there maybe caves that are a protective place for past or current life, or a shelter for human explorers in the future.

They have named the holes the Seven Sisters and they are located at some of the highest latitudes on the planet, up on a volcano named Arsia Mons, right near the tallest mountain on Mars.

They are so high up, in fact, that it is very unlikely that they could be used for human habitation, to even be considered having microbial forms of life. They do not think that if life ever existed on Mars, there would be much of a chance that it had migrated to somewhere this high up.

The report puts forth the theory at the deep holes on Arsia Mons most likely were formed when underground stresses caused spreading and faults that in turn opened up spaces underneath the surface. Some of the holes line up with bowl shaped pits where they think the surface material collapsed to fill in the underground gap created by the fault.

They are going to look for similar formation to the Seven Sisters that might exist at lower levels and would be more accessible to the future Mars missions.

The project scientist for Mars Odyssey is Jeffrey Plaut of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Other members of the team include Phil Christensen of Arizona State University, Tempe who is the principal investigator for the Thermal Emission Imaging System on Mars Odyssey and
Glen Cushing of the U.S. Geological Survey's Astrogeology Team and of Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Ariz.

The Mars Odyssey is managed by JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The primary contractor and builder is Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver. The orbiter's Thermal Emission Imaging System was developed by Arizona State University, Tempe, working with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote Sensing, Santa Barbara, Calif. It is operated by Arizona State University.

Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory http://www.jpl.nasa.gov