The aeolian environment of the landing site for the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Rover in Oxia Planum, Mars
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Aeolian features at Oxia Planum—the 2023 landing site for the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Rover (ERFR)—are important for Mars exploration because they record information about past and current wind regimes, sand transport vectors, and lend insight to the abrasion, deposition, and transport of granular material. To characterize the wind regime and erosional history of Oxia Planum we used a combination of manual observational and machine-learning techniques to analyze the morphometrics, distribution, and orientation of 10,753 aeolian bedforms (Transverse Aeolian Ridges[TARs]) and landforms (Periodic Bedrock Ridges [PBRs]) around the ERFR landing ellipses. We found that, irrespective of the scale of the TARs, crestline azimuths are consistent across the study area and we infer that the bedform forming winds blew from NW-NNW toward SE-SSE. PBR azimuths show a substantively different orientation to the aeolian bedforms, and we infer that the winds necessary to abrade PBRs had a N-NNE or S-SSE orientation (180° ambiguity). From observations of active dust devils and windstreaks from repeat imagery, we infer a W-WNW or E-ESE (180° ambiguity) wind dominates today. Finally, we compare the inferred wind direction results from the aeolian landscape to modeled wind data from Mars Global Circulation Models. We note that, despite landscape evidence to the contrary, modeled contemporary wind direction lacks the consistent directionality to be responsible for the orientation of aeolian features in Oxia Planum. These results characterize aeolian features ERFR will encounter and suggests multiple wind regimes have influenced the surficial expression of the landing site.
Date Issued
2021-04
Date Acceptance
2021-01-22
Citation
Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 2021, 126 (4)
ISSN
2169-9097
Publisher
American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Journal / Book Title
Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets
Volume
126
Issue
4
Copyright Statement
© 2021. The Authors.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
License URL
Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2020je006723
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
2020JE006723
Date Publish Online
2021-04-01