The European Space Agency (ESA) has published a recording created from data from the Mars Express mission. It allows us to imagine what a flight over the surface of the Red Planet would look like.
The video published by ESA focuses on a region called Oxia Palus, whose total area is 890,000 km². This is more than twice the size of Germany. Ares Vallis dominates in this region. This is an outflow channel formed by streams of water that once flowed across the surface of Mars. Ares Vallis is 1,700 kilometers long. It cascades down from the planet’s southern highlands to reach the Chryse Planitia, a vast lowland in the Northern Hemisphere of the planet. Scientists believe that in the distant past its territory may have been occupied by the sea.
The video begins with the area marked with a white rectangle. This is the landing site of Pathfinder, whose Sojourner rover explored the area for 12 weeks in 1997. Continuing south, we fly over two large craters, Masursky and Sagan. The partially weathered rim of Masursky suggests that water once flowed through it. It is filled with a pile of blocks, creating the so-called chaotic relief. Such structures are characteristic of regions with outflow channels. They are thought to have formed when subsurface water suddenly came out. As a result, the surface slumped and broke into blocks of various sizes and shapes.
Just beyond this chaotic pile of blocks is the Galilaei crater with a highly eroded rim and a gorge connecting it to a neighboring channel. There was probably once a lake in the crater that spilled over into the neighborhood. Next, the streamlined islands and terraced banks of a long-dry river appear in the frame, with the droplet-shaped “tails” of the islands indicating the direction of water flow in those distant times.
At the end of the video you can see the Oxia Planum. It was chosen as a landing site for the Rosalind Franklin rover. Its primary mission is astrobiological research to look for traces of life, some of which may have existed on Mars in the days when it was an aquatic world. Rosalind Franklin is scheduled to launch in 2028.
We previously covered a Martian meteorite containing evidence of water’s existence on the planet’s surface for longer than commonly believed.
Provided by ESA
