Figure 12. Boulder Range-Frequency Distribution (BRFD,top) and Boulder Size-Range Distribution (BSRD, bottom)
for the unnamed martian crater (Fig. 11), and the two lunar craters:
Camelot, and South Ray (Watkins et al., 2019). Data for the unnamed
crater are cutoff at 3R to minimize contamination from nearby craters.
The data for Camelot and South Ray crater were originally expressed in
crater radii from the crater rim (Watkins et al., 2019), and they are
re-plotted here in radii from the crater center.
The comparison of BSRDs and BRFDs around these craters show several
intriguing similarities and disparities in the boulder populations. The
unnamed martian crater shows the expected radial decrease in boulder
abundance, and maximum boulder size for impact ejecta. However, compared
to craters of similar size on the moon, there is a substantial lack of
boulders with diameters above ~4 m. In addition, the
ejected boulders lack a prominent peak in frequency near the rim (as
seen in Camelot) and diminish in abundance near 3 R (unlike South Ray).
Further investigation would be required to determine if these
differences are attributable to the differing erosional processes,
regolith thicknesses, or target lithologies, as well as how these
results can inform the relative rates of boulder degradation vs. crater
relaxation inferred for these boulder halo craters (Levy et al., 2018).
However, such an investigation would be readily enabled by MBARS, and
could greatly expand the number of craters with fully characterized
ejecta populations.
6. Conclusions
MBARS is an accessible, open source tool for planetary scientists to
locate and measure boulders in HiRISE images accurately and rapidly. We
demonstrate that this tool, when applied in conjunction with
supplemental manual analyses, provides a reliable technique to
automatically assess large boulder populations with minimal manual
effort. We show this in four key ways:
1) MBARS can accurately measure the height and width of the Viking
landers, demonstrating accuracy of these methods on objects of known
size.
2) Manual boulder measurements taken for other purposes and surveys can
be used to calibrate the automated results, reducing the need for new,
redundant analyses.
3) MBARS is capable of measuring boulders (and landers) to the same or
greater degree of accuracy with previously published methods of
automated boulder measurements.
4) Comparison of MBARS analyses around a small crater compare well with
prior analyses of similarly sized lunar craters.
Variations in boulder distributions can be distinctive of specific
geologic processes including impacts, mass wasting, and glacial
processes. We hope that MBARS can be used as an essential tool going
forward in many surface investigations of these processes. It is built
to function on high resolution images of the martian surface but can be
adapted to work on other bodies where sufficiently high-resolution data
is available. This methodology enables many avenues of scientific
investigation into impact, erosional, and glacial processes, which can
now be pursued more rapidly and at broader scope than is viable with
manual analysis alone.
Acknowledgements
Current support for this research comes from NASA’s MDAP program, grant
#80NSSC21K1093D. D. Hood has been funded throughout the project by the
Louisiana Space Grant Graduate Student Research Assistantship awarded to
D. Hood (NNX15AH82H) and NASA’s Mars Data Analysis Program to S.
Karunatillake and D. Hood (80NSSC18K1375‐MDAP). The authors also thank
Elizabeth McKinnie, and J. Patrick Brothers for their boulder
delineations used as part of this work. The authors thank NASA, JPL, and
the University of Arizona for supporting access to HiRISE images.
Data and Software Availability
Statement
Data in support of this publication are located on the Texas Data
Repository “Supporting Data for: ‘The Martian Boulder Automatic
Recognition System, MBARS”’ DOI: 10.18738/T8/EFPJWY .The code to
operate MBARS, along with operating instructions and other information
is available at https://github.com/dhood14/MBARS .
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