Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Digital imagery and related data, such as digital terrain models, have become more common as sensors from satellites to digital cameras have increased in availability. This development provides the opportunity to extract quantitative data that were previously not available and contribute to a wide range of geological investigations. My research interest is to develop techniques to extract such data and/or apply them to geological problems of a variety of scales. ) On Mars, we use a technique that combines satellite images and digital terrain models from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) camera on board the European Mars Express orbiter. This technique enables us to measure the 3D orientation of large scale layers. On Earth, this type of measurement is an integral part of geological studies and provides data that play an important role for the understanding of geological histories. The HRSC camera was the first instrument to provide elevation data with a sufficient resolution for such measurements on Mars. We developed the technique and are the first group to use it. This method will be the only way to obtain the 3D data until humans are able to take field measurements on the surface of Mars. Our work improves our understanding of the origin of those layers and provides insights into the geological history of Mars. ) At the other end of the image scale, I use a special microscope-based adapter to obtain data about individual grains within deformed rocks. Those data are used to increase our knowledge of how rocks deform at the microscopic scale, which is important to our understanding of many aspects of plate tectonics and mountain building processes.