Mars From Afar
We're all armchair travelers when it comes to Mars, but fortunately a number of spacecraft bearing sophisticated cameras have orbited and even landed on the planet over the past three decades. These spacecraft have provided a steady stream of breathtaking images of the martian surface that, as you'll see in this sampler, are the next best thing to being there. To see the images to full effect, please click on each image to enlarge it. You may also want to resize the resulting popup window to fill the screen. Unless otherwise noted, all images were taken by the Mars Global Surveyor's Mars Orbiter Camera. For the latest news on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, see the website of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. For updates on the Phoenix lander, visit the Phoenix Mars Mission website. See also Links & Books.—Peter Tyson
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The Planet
This is Mars as it appeared in May 2002. It's early spring in the Northern
Hemisphere, whose seasonal carbon-dioxide frost cap has begun its annual
retreat. Other white areas in this composite are clouds, some seen hovering
over volcanoes such as Olympus Mons, the dark round spot in the far left of
the image. The huge canyon system known as Valles Marineris is visible as a
thick horizontal line in the lower right. All told, Mars is about 4,200 miles
in diameter, a little over half as big across as the Earth.
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Canyon
In the center of this mosaic of Mars lies the Valles Marineris, the largest
known chasm in the solar system. It stretches over 1,860 miles from west to
east, and in places reaches five miles in depth. (The Grand Canyon, at its
deepest, is just over a mile from rim to river.) Huge rivers once flowed north
from the chasm's north-central canyons to a vast basin called Acidalia Planitia
(the dark area in the top right of the image). To the west of the Valles
Marineris you can see three ancient volcanoes (dark brown circles), each about
15 miles high. This mosaic consists of 102 images from the Viking Orbiter, and
the viewer's distance is 1,550 miles above the surface.
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Volcano
This mosaic of images taken by Viking 1 on June 22, 1978, shows Olympus Mons,
the highest known volcano in the solar system. Its summit caldera lies over
78,500 feet above the surrounding plains, making it over two and a half times
the height of Mt. Everest. The volcano proper, defined by the roughly circular
cone visible in the center of the image, is about 340 miles in diameter,
revealing just how gradual a slope the mountain's flanks display. Encircling
the volcano is a moat of lava thought to have come from Olympus Mons.
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Volcanic Vent
This deep trough lies in the Tharsis region of Mars, home to several of the largest shield volcanoes in the solar system. It is a volcanic vent, where lava erupted long ago. The shallow, scalloped depressions in the middle and left (west) of the image may have been lava lakes that emptied into the vent at the end of the eruption that created the vent. To the right (east) are two channels that once likely drained the vent. Once deeper and narrower, the vent became more trough-like as material eroded from its sides and fell to its floor. The image was taken on December 6, 2006, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment.
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Sand Dunes
Resembling a group of horseshoe crabs coming ashore, windblown sand
dunes grace the floor of Wirtz Crater. The shape of the dunes indicates that
the wind has blown the sand from the southwest toward the northeast (lower left
to upper right in the image). Illuminated by sunlight streaming in from the
northwest, the scene comprises an area less than two miles in width.
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Crater
Looking like it might have been blasted out yesterday, this impressive meteor
impact crater lies in the northern Elysium Planitia, the second largest
volcanic region on Mars. The crater's diameter is a little over twice that of
Meteor Crater in Arizona (which is three quarters of a mile wide and our
planet's best preserved impact crater). Darkening more than half the crater,
the shadow gives an idea of just how deep the basin is.
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Ice Cap
Dubbed martian "Swiss cheese," these raised sections of ice in the south polar
ice cap and the circular depressions within them may be a combination of water
ice and frozen carbon dioxide, or "dry ice." The area covered in this image is
1.9 by 5.6 miles, and the tallest portions of the raised ice mesas are about 14
feet high.
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Polar Gas Channels
Known informally as a "spider," the topographic feature seen in this image of Mars' south polar region represents a process not found on Earth. The branching tendrils contain carbon dioxide gas, which flows through the channels until it reaches a vent; it then escapes to the atmosphere, carrying dust with it. The tendrils, appearing bright-white with the carbon dioxide ice that covers the poles during winter, weave into the surrounding icy terrain, which, in turn, is blanketed by the region's characteristic reddish-brown dust. The image was taken on March 24, 2007, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment.
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Faulting
The deep trough slashing diagonally across the center of this image resulted
from faulting and down-dropping of the land. Boulders the size of small
buildings can be seen on the slopes of this depression, which is sunlit from
the left. Dark streaks on the trough's slopes are the paths of small
landslides. This trough and the shallower one in the lower part of the image
cut across lava flows, suggesting that the trenches formed after the lava had
cooled and hardened. Short, parallel ridges in the valley floors are probably
dunes.
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Layered Rocks
Water or wind deposited the sediments that are thought to make up these layered
rock outcroppings. Wind later shaped and exposed the layers, which on close
inspection resemble those on a topographical map. Note the dark drifts of sand
in the lower center of the image, which is illuminated by sunlight coming from
the upper left. The scene is in the bottom of an impact crater near the martian
equator.
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Gullies
Not dramatically different from a mountainside in, say, the American Southwest,
this weathered wall of a crater displays gullies that might have been carved by
groundwater flowing downhill. Wintertime frost dusts the wall, while below on
the crater floor you can see dunes sculpted by the wind. The Mars Global
Surveyor's narrow-angle camera took the shot, which was then "colorized" using
actual colors of the surface obtained by the spacecraft's wide-angle
cameras.
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Clouds
One early martian afternoon in April 1999, the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC)
captured this view of diaphanous clouds floating over the summit of Apollinaris
Patera, a volcano near the planet's equator. The various impact craters
pockmarking its crater and flanks indicate how ancient the volcano is. It is
also enormous: An estimated three miles high, its summit caldera alone is about
50 miles across. The color in this image was derived from the MOC's red and
blue wide-angle camera systems and does not represent true color as you would
see it with the naked eye.
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Mesas
To some viewers, the spaghetti-like forms captured in this image may at first
glance appear raised from the surface, but they are actually troughs separating
layered mesas. Pitting and erosion fashioned the mesas, which are lit by the
sun from the lower left. Dust cloaks the landscape, and large, wind-crafted
ripples can be seen on the trough floors. The image is slightly less than two
miles wide.
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Landslide
Sometime in the distant past, a large portion of this slope in the Kasei Valles
region gave way and slid down into the valley below. Scientists know it was a
long time ago because of the impact craters apparent in both the landslide's
scar and its resulting deposit. At the base of the scar, just below the
slightly oval-shaped impact crater, you can see numerous black dots. These are
house-sized boulders that have tumbled down from higher up the 660-foot slope.
Near the cornice, you can just make out layers in the bedrock revealed by the
landslide.
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Plains
Like certain high-latitude areas in the Northern Hemisphere on Earth, the
northern plains of Mars often show patterned ground. Whether this stippled
surface indicates ground ice, as similar-looking surfaces do in parts of
Alaska, Canada, and Siberia, is unknown. In this image, taken at a latitude of
72.4°N, the dark dots and lines are low mounds and chains of mounds,
respectively. Note the buried impact crater in the center of the image, which
is about 1.9 miles across.
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Dust Storms
In late June 2001, as the martian southern winter gave way to spring, dust
storms began to kick up as cold air from the south polar ice cap moved north
toward warmer air at the equator. By early July, dust storms had cropped up all
over the planet, whose surface, by the end of the month, had become almost
entirely obscured, as if by a single, global storm. By
late September, the storms had largely abated, though the atmosphere remained
hazy into November.
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Terrain
Mars Pathfinder's stereo imaging system took a series of photographs that were
used to create this 360-degree "geometrically improved, color-enhanced"
panorama of the surface of Mars. The images were made over the course of three
martian days to ensure consistent lighting and shadows across the panorama. In
the lower portion of the image, you can see the lander, with its opened petals,
deflated airbags, and pair of ramps. The Sojourner rover descended the rear
(right) ramp to the surface, then made its way to the large rock, dubbed
"Yogi," where it is using its Alpha Proton X-Ray Spectrometer to study the
rock's composition. The "Twin Peaks" visible on the horizon are less than a
mile and a quarter away.
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Frozen Water
Use the slider (in enlarged version) to compare these two color images from the Phoenix Mars Lander, which touched down on the Red Planet on May 25, 2008. The lander's Surface Stereo Imager took these pictures on June 15 and June 19, respectively. The pictures show sublimation—the passing of a substance, in this case ice, directly from a solid to a gas—in a lander-dug trench over the course of four days. In the lower left of the lefthand image, a group of white lumps is visible within the shadow; in the righthand image, they're gone. Look closely also at the white patches in full sun—other loss of ice can be seen there. These images confirmed the presence of water ice in the subsoil of the martian arctic.
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The Planet, Again
This QuickTime VR, or full-round panorama, was created from a photo-mosaic of images captured over a
five-year period by the Viking orbiters in the 1970s. The smooth areas of the globe
are geologically younger than the cratered areas, which are ancient. In places, cliffs
of up to a mile and a quarter in height separate the two areas. Some Mars experts
speculate that water may have once covered the Northern Hemisphere, which is smoother
and younger than the Southern. Note bright and dark streaks on the martian surface;
these point to active wind processes on Mars.
1.3MB; requires free QuickTime plugin software
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