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Microdune

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Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms

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Definition

Small (decimeter – meter size) dune. The presence of large (100s km) fields of microdunes on Venus has been inferred indirectly from radar data.

Description

Regions on Venus showing very strong anisotropy of radar echo (Weitz et al. 1994; Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Radar images of one of the hypothesized microdune fields on Venus taken from opposite directions and illustrating anisotropy of radar backscattering. The scene is centered at 47°S 228°E and is 450 km wide; north is on the top. Crater Stowe is outside the frame. (a) Mosaic radar images obtained by orbital synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) onboard Magellan spacecraft with radar beam incidence angle of 26.0° from the west (east-looking). Vertical black bar is a gap in data coverage. Portion of image C1-MIDR_45S223;1. (b) The same, but obtained under west-looking geometry (incidence angle is almost the same, 25.3°, but from the east). Portion of image C1-MIDR_45S223;201. The maximum difference in radar echo strength between...

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References

  • Bondarenko NV, Kreslavsky MA, Head JW (2006) North-south roughness anisotropy on Venus from the Magellan Radar Altimeter: correlation with geology. J Geophys Res 111:E06S12

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  • Weitz CM, Plaut JJ, Greeley R, Saunders RS (1994) Dunes and Microdunes on Venus: why were so few found in the Magellan data? Icarus 112(1):282–295

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Mikhail Kreslavsky

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  1. Mikhail Kreslavsky
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Correspondence to Mikhail Kreslavsky .

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Kreslavsky, M. (2014). Microdune. In: Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9213-9_496-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9213-9_496-1

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