I-95, near blob bypass, clearly indicated.

In June 2017, Watkins was selected as a NASA astronaut and in April 2022, she launched into space to work on the ISS. Watkins finished writing the JGR paper while a postdoc at Caltech and submitted it to the journal as she went into astronaut training. By the time proofs of the paper were ready for her to review, she was in space—so she gave her final input on the paper from low-Earth orbit.

Oh.

Mars lacks the tectonic plates that cause most of the shaking on Earth. Instead, the red planet is almost entirely shaped by shaped by eolian, or wind, erosion.

Eolian! Isn’t that a musical term?

Mars’s atmospheric volume is just 1 percent that of Earth, so one might not expect wind erosion to be so important on the planet.

One would be wrong.

In recent decades geologists argued that the impact of modern wind acting to cause erosion on Mars is very limited.

They would be wrong, too.

And yet, it now appears that wind erosion plays a key role in driving the rock cycle on Mars, certainly during its earlier history prior to 3 billion years ago when the rocks at Gale Crater were being formed and then eroded.

She wrote all this from low-Earth orbit, you say?