Lynn Carter

So one of the weird features on Mars is this Medusa-Faceae formation.

And basically, it's a series of hills in the mid-latitudes of Mars.

So this is zero degrees latitude, and then this is longitude, so it covers a really huge area.

And so there's all these hills, Gordy Dorsum, Amazonas Mensa.

They have very sort of poetic names, and they all have this linear look to them.

And they have kind of a weird texture.

And because they're essentially these mountains, no one really knows what to make of them.

This is what the surface looks like.

So it's wind eroded.

There's like these dunes, streaks down the side.

There's occasionally boulders and little layers.

Here's another example and you can see that some blocky debris fell out and there's some streaks coming down.

There's really fine layers here.

So it's this really weird rock and so people didn't really understand what it was.

Basically, people now think that this is a giant set of pyroclastic deposits.

So pyroclastics are things like ash or tephra that get deposited during explosive volcanic eruptions.

And so Medusa Fase is probably a buildup of a lot of this material that either was launched into the atmosphere and then fell down over time as it was blown by the wind, or possibly even some of it could be flows.

If any of you have seen explosive volcanoes, people are always really worried that there'll be this big pyroclastic flow that's gonna come down and run over

towns and things like that that definitely happens on Mars too and so some of these deposits could be some of those different things so the question that we had was how much material is really here and over what period did this happen so if you have this explosive volcanism you're throwing a lot of gas into the atmosphere maybe that's the case where you could have increased the density of the atmosphere have it a more habitable environment

So when we look at this with Sharad, so this is looking at the Gordy Dorsum and this Amazonas Mensa hill in particular.