Aeolian Landforms in the ExoMars 2028 Landing Site

Kurzfassung

ESA’s ExoMars Rosalind Franklin Mission will land a rover at Oxia Planum to search for signs of life on Mars [1, 2]. Bright bedforms (Transverse Aeolian Ridges [TARs]), and erosive wind-formed ridges (Periodic Bedrock Ridges [PBRs]) have been documented in the landing site [3-6]. In this study, we compare automated and manual mapping of aeolian features in CTX (6 m/pixel), CaSSIS (5 m/pixel) and HiRISE (25 cm/pixel) images in the landing site (Fig. 1) with sand fluxes from the NASA Ames GCM [7] obtained with the Martian Surface/Atmosphere Web Interface [8]. In particular, we focus our attention on bright bedforms, ridges and wind streaks (Fig. 1). Since these features are widespread on Mars, the observations made here on ridge and bedform are also relevant to other areas and landing sites [9-13].