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| Keywords: Mars Viking 21i093.png en This false color photo of the surface of Mars was taken by Viking Lander 2 at its Utopia Planitia landing site on May 18 1979 and relayed to Earth by Orbiter 1 on June 7 It shows a thin coating of water ice on the rocks and soil The time the frost appeared corresponds almost exactly with the buildup of frost one Martian year 23 Earth months ago Then it remained on the surface for about 100 days Scientists believe dust particles in the atmosphere pick up bits of solid water That combination is not heavy enough to settle to the ground But carbon dioxide which makes up 95 percent of the Martian atmosphere freezes and adheres to the particles and they become heavy enough to sink Warmed by the Sun the surface evaporates the carbon dioxide and returns it to the atmosphere leaving behind the water and dust The ice seen in this picture like that which formed one Martian year ago is extremely thin perhaps no more than one-thousandth of an centimeter thick The view is looking towards the south southeast the long boulder to the right is roughly one meter across Own work based on images in the http //pds-geosciences wustl edu/geo/vl1_vl2-m-lcs-2-edr-v1/vl_0002/ NASA Viking image archive<br>See accurate colors at http //photojournal jpl nasa gov/catalog/PIA00571 PIA00571 Ice on Mars Utopia Planitia Again Roel van der Hoorn Van der Hoorn 2010-02-25; original photo was taken 1979-05-18 I used the original http //pdsimg jpl nasa gov/data/vl1_vl2-m-lcs-2-edr-v1 0/vl_0002/i0xx/21i093 blu 21i093 blu http //pdsimg jpl nasa gov/data/vl1_vl2-m-lcs-2-edr-v1 0/vl_0002/i0xx/21i093 grn 21i093 grn and http //pdsimg jpl nasa gov/data/vl1_vl2-m-lcs-2-edr-v1 0/vl_0002/i0xx/21i093 red 21i093 red images from the http //pdsimg jpl nasa gov/data/vl1_vl2-m-lcs-2-edr-v1 0/vl_0002/i0xx/ NASA Viking image archive converted them to png manually removed the noise and finally merged them into one image almost matching true color; see here for the channel mixing process Except for the conversion this was all done in Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Adobe Photoshop CS4 The original files by NASA are in the public domain and so is this new one I created this image as a replacement for File Ice on Mars Utopia Planitia PIA00571 jpg and File Viking2 frost enhance jpg These files were created by NASA but the quality is not very high Using the original pictures from the Lander archive resulted in a higher quality image Van der Hoorn The image is based on an original image from NASA to which the following copyright statement is applicable PD-USGov-NASA Mars landscapes Viking mission Utopia Planitia | ||||
