Martian araneiform terrain, located in the Southern polar regions, consists of features with central pits and radial troughs which are thought to be associated with the solid state greenhouse effect under a CO2 ice sheet. Sublimation at the base of this ice leads to gas buildup, fracturing of the ice and the flow of gas and entrained regolith out of vents and onto the surface. There are two possible pathways for the gas: through the gap between the ice slab and the underlying regolith, as proposed by Kieffer (2007), or through the pores of a permeable regolith layer, which would imply that regolith properties can control the spacing between adjacent spiders, as suggested by Hao et al. (2019). We test this hypothesis quantitatively in order to place constraints on the regolith properties. Based on previously estimated flow rates and thermophysical arguments, we suggest that there is insufficient depth of porous regolith to support the full gas flow through the regolith. By contrast, free gas flow through a regolith–ice gap is capable of supplying the likely flow rates for gap sizes on the order of a centimetre. This size of gap can be opened in the centre of a spider feature by gas pressure bending the overlying ice slab upwards, or by levitating it entirely as suggested in the original Kieffer (2007) model. Our calculations therefore support at least some of the gas flowing through a gap opened between the regolith and ice. Regolith properties most likely still play a role in the evolution of spider morphology, by regolith cohesion controlling the erosion of the central pit and troughs, for example.

Until recently, the influence of basal liquid water on the evolution of buried glaciers in Mars' mid latitudes was assumed to be negligible because the latter stages of Mars' Amazonian period (3 Ga to present) have long been thought to have been similarly cold and dry to today. Recent identifications of several landforms interpreted as eskers associated with these young (100s Ma) glaciers calls this assumption into doubt. They indicate basal melting (at least locally and transiently) of their parent glaciers. Although rare, they demonstrate a more complex mid-to-late Amazonian environment than was previously understood. Here, we discuss several open questions posed by the existence of glacier-linked eskers on Mars, including on their global-scale abundance and distribution, the drivers and dynamics of melting and drainage, and the fate of meltwater upon reaching the ice margin. Such questions provide rich opportunities for collaboration between the Mars and Earth cryosphere research communities.

The CoPhyLab (Cometary Physics Laboratory) project is designed to study the physics of comets through a series of earth-based experiments. For these experiments, a dust analogue was created with physical properties comparable to those of the non-volatile dust found on comets. This ‘CoPhyLab dust’ is planned to be mixed with water and CO2 ice and placed under cometary conditions in vacuum chambers to study the physical processes taking place on the nuclei of comets. In order to develop this dust analogue, we mixed two components representative for the non-volatile materials present in cometary nuclei. We chose silica dust as a representative for the mineral phase and charcoal for the organic phase, which also acts as a darkening agent. In this paper, we provide an overview of known cometary analogues before presenting measurements of eight physical properties of different mixtures of the two materials and a comparison of these measurements with known cometary values. The physical properties of interest are particle size, density, gas permeability, spectrophotometry, and mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties. We found that the analogue dust that matches the highest number of physical properties of cometary materials consists of a mixture of either 60 per cent/40 per cent or 70 per cent/30 per cent of silica dust/charcoal by mass. These best-fit dust analogue will be used in future CoPhyLab experiments.

In order to understand the geological evolution of asteroids Eros, Itokawa and Ryugu and their collisional history, previous studies investigated boulder size distributions on their surfaces. However, quantitative comparison of these size distributions is hampered by numerous differences between these studies regarding the definition of a boulder's size, measuring technique and the fitting method to determine the power-index of the boulder size distributions. We provide a consistent and coherent model of boulder size distributions by remeasuring the boulders on the entire surfaces of Eros and Itokawa using the Small Body Mapping Tool (SBMT) and combining our observations with the Ryugu data of Michikami et al. (2019). We derived power-indices of the boulder size distributions of −3.25 ± 0.14 for Eros, −3.05 ± 0.14 for Itokawa and −2.65 ± 0.05 for Ryugu. The asteroid with the highest number density of boulders ≥ 5 m turns out to be Ryugu, not Itokawa, as suggested by an earlier study. We show that the appearance of the boulders tends towards more elongated shapes as the size of an asteroid decreases, which can be explained by differences in asteroid gravity and boulder friction angles. Our quantitative observational results indicate that boulder migration preferentially affects smaller boulders, and tends to occur on larger asteroids.