English

Wind erosion on Mars and other small terrestrial planets

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2019-11-06 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

We carried out wind tunnel experiments on parabolic flights with 100 μ\mum Mojave Mars simulant sand. The experiments result in shear stress thresholds and erosion rates for varying g-levels at 600 Pa pressure. Our data confirm former results on JSC Mars 1A simulant where the threshold shear stress is lower under Martian gravity than extrapolated from earlier ground-based studies which fits observations of Martian sand activity. The data are consistent with a model by Shao and Lu (2000) and can also be applied to other small terrestrial (exo)-planets with low pressure atmospheres.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.01692,
  title  = {Wind erosion on Mars and other small terrestrial planets},
  author = {Maximilian Kruss and Grzegorz Musiolik and Tunahan Demirci and Gerhard Wurm and Jens Teiser},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.01692},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:05:05.823Z