Research Experience for Undergraduates
There is a nice program for undergraduates here in the US that is called REU: Research Experience for Undergraduates.
Within this framework the Planet Four team here in Boulder, CO was fortunate to receive funding support by the United Arabic Emirates for one of these undergraduate positions for this summer.
Working with us was Shahad Badri, and the project we came up with for her was to look at blotch data from Planet Four. Our hypothesis was that it should be relatively straight forward and provide us with insights on jet eruption physics alone, because no wind was involved in depositing the jet deposits.
As usual, the reality turned out to be more complicated than our naive thinking, so we are still digesting the results of plotting blotch area and blotch eccentricities over the time of the Martian year (= Ls = Solar Longitude), but we wanted to show you the nice poster that Shahad came up with at the end of the summer project.
As in any exciting science project, the analysis created more questions than we had before. We will need to juxtapose these results with geometrical parameters of the fans, to see where we maybe have transitions between fans and blotches due to ground winds, shifting deposits around, making blotches look more fan-like.
Thanks to Shahad for her diligent work over this summer!
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