Martian surface Martian surface The study of surface characteristics (or surface properties and processes) is a broad category of Mars science that examines the nature of the materials making up the Martian surface. The study evolved from telescopic and remote-sensing techniques developed by astronomers to study planetary surfaces. However, it has increasingly become a subdiscipline of geology as automated spacecraft bring ever-improving resolution and instrument capabilities. By using characteristics such as color, albedo, and thermal inertia and analytical tools such as reflectance spectroscopy and radar, scientists are able to study the chemistry and physical makeup (e.g., grain sizes, surface roughness, and rock
Incompressible surface compressing "S" along "D". A non-negative complexity measure on compact surfaces without 2-sphere components is "b"("S") − "χ"("S"), where "b"("S") is the zeroth Betti number (the number of connected components) and "χ"("S") is the Euler characteristic. When compressing a compressible surface, the Euler characteristic increases by two, while "b" might remain the same or increase by 1. Thus, every properly embedded compact surface without 2-sphere components is related to an incompressible surface through a sequence of compressions. Sometimes we drop the conditions that "S" be compressible or that "D" be anything more than a disk that intersects "S" only along