Ice amount in craters on the Martian Northern Polar Region

This Master Thesis is a work representing a scientific report, performed at the SETI institute and NASA Ames Research Center in collaboration with Luleå University of Technology. The work consists of mapping craters on Mars northern polar region. The partly unexplored Martian northern hemisphere has like the southern hemisphere a great number of impacts all over the surface. Because of the Martian orbit and the tilt of the Martian axis, the impacts on the northern hemisphere are unexplored compared to those of the southern hemisphere. The craters on the northern polar region are partly or totally covered by carbon dioxide frost and water frost during specific times in solar longitude. Separated from the northern residual polar cap, the craters on the northern polar region are believed to have residual ice during all Martian year. This ice is thought to be remnants of a former and greater polar cap consisting of water. As the perennial polar caps are related to the Martian climate history, the seasonal polar caps are related to the current climate and circulation. By understanding the sublimation and condensation of carbon dioxide and water, seasonal change and atmospheric circulation of current and future climate of Mars will be better known. The craters have been analyzed with the help of context images and high resolution images, taken by the cameras CTX and HiRISE, riding on MRO. All of the observed craters show different formations and depending on their location and how big they are, the covering of ice deposit varies. The main body of the craters observed within this work has appearance features within them. Unexplored features like Dark Dunes Spots, Dust Devils and Polygonal nets are just a few of them. The ice covering a specific crater has been divided into different intervals in order to easier determine and analyze craters with summer ice. To investigate if the ice amount is due to different features observed within a crater, all observed features have been mapped and constitute a part of the results. For future Martian scientific work, a description of every image of each specific crater has been stored within a database, together with an image.Validerat; 20101217 (root