Latest Coprates quadrangle Stories
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online One of the most awe-inspiring sights on the planet Earth is the Grand Canyon. The Colorado River has cut through 2 billion years of geologic history, carving out a canyon that is 277 miles long and up to 18 miles wide. However, next to Valles Marineris on Mars, the Grand Canyon is a mere scratch in the ground. Valles Marineris stretches over 4000 kilometers in length and is 200 kilometers wide, with a maximum depth of 10 kilometers....
Scientists have reconstructed the formation of two curious features in the northern ice cap of Mars"”a chasm larger than the Grand Canyon and a series of spiral troughs"”solving a pair of mysteries dating back four decades while finding new evidence of climate change on Mars.In a pair of papers to be published in the journal Nature on May 27, Jack Holt and Isaac Smith of The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics and their colleagues describe how they used radar data...
The U.S. space agency says its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found evidence that liquid water remained on Mars far longer than previously theorized. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration spacecraft has observed hydrated silica, or opal, spread across large regions of Mars. That, scientists said, suggests liquid water was on the planet's surface as recently as 2 billion years ago. "This is an exciting discovery because it extends the time range for liquid water on Mars, and the...
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has observed a new category of minerals spread across large regions of Mars. This discovery suggests that liquid water remained on the planet's surface a billion years later than scientists believed, and it played an important role in shaping the planet's surface and possibly hosting life.Researchers examining data from the orbiter's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars have found evidence of hydrated silica, commonly known as opal. The...
Parts of ancient Mars may have been wet for a billion years longer than scientists previously thought, a new study of images of the red planet's surface suggests. Along with Earth and the other inner planets of our solar system, Mars formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists have long known that flowing water formed many of the features seen on Mars today, but previous studies suggested that water runoff from precipitation had ceased after the first billion years of Mars'...
ESA -- These images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA's Mars Express spacecraft, show Coprates Chasma, a major trough in the Valles Marineris canyon system.The HRSC obtained these images during orbit 449 with a ground resolution of approximately 48 metres per pixel. The scenes show the region containing the sections of Coprates Chasma and Coprates Catena, over an area centred at about 13.5º South and 300º East, roughly in the centre of the Valles Marineris...
How does an arid and bone-dry landscape form the largest canyon in the solar system? The question on Mars maps to the Valles Marineris, a crack in the planet so large as to dwarf the Grand Canyon and a primary imaging target for the Mars Express spacecraft.Astrobiology Magazine -- These images, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA's Mars Express spacecraft, show the central part of the 4000-kilometer long Valles Marineris canyon on Mars.The HRSC obtained these images...
