ACTIVITY OF AND SEDIMENT FLUXES FROM AEOLIAN BEDFORMS IN HERSCHEL CRATER, MARS

Herschel Crater, Mars, hosts extensive fields of sand dunes and sand sheets. The dunes are predominantely barchan and barchanoid and exhibit active migration of both their slip faces and their superposing aeolian ripples. This activity indicates a near-constant wind azimuth out of the north-northeast above fluid threshold and slower, more frequent winds above grain impact threshold.

Here, we present relations for 1) total and 2) constituent sand flux from ripple migration and slip face advance; and 3) dune celerity as a function of dune height (proxied by the dune volume-surface area ratio) paying attention for any deviations from from a simple 1/height relation.

Our study uses HiRISE orthoimagery overlain on DEMs to track the movement of aeolian ripple patterns using an ENVI software package called Co-Registration of Optically Sensed Images and Correlation (COSI-Corr). COSI-Corr tracks ripple pattern displacements down to ~8 cm (~1/3 of a pixel) and we are expanding the number and type of Martian aeolian environments to characterize, both within and outside of Herschel Crater.