Latest Hellas Planitia Stories
WASHINGTON, March 7, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has provided images allowing scientists for the first time to create a 3-D reconstruction of ancient water channels below the Martian surface. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO ) The spacecraft took numerous images during the past few years that showed channels attributed to catastrophic flooding in the last 500 million years. Mars during this period had been...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express has offered up a high-resolution photo of a river-like structure on Mars. The spacecraft used its high-resolution stereo camera last year to snap an image of Reull Vallis on the Red Planet. Reull Vallis is a river-like structure believed to have formed when running water flowed in the distant martian past. The ancient river bed cuts a steep-sided channel through the Promethei Terra...
Scientists have found further evidence that massive seas once existed on Mars. A geological mapping project discovered sedimentary deposits in a region called Hellas Planitia, which suggests it was once a large sea. The 1,200 mile wide basin is a giant impact crater, the largest one on Mars. The team says their data supports the theory that a lake existed there between 4.5 and 3.5 billion years ago. Some scientists believe that conditions on Mars were more favorable for the evolution of life...
The Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera imaged a region close to Ma'adim Vallis, one of the largest canyons on Mars, finding craters, lava flows and tectonic features.After Valles Marineris, Ma'adim Vallis is one of the largest canyons on Mars. The region, lying south-east of Ma'adim Vallis, was imaged on 24 December 2008. The pictures are centered at about 29°S and 182°E and have a ground resolution of 15 m/pixel.Ma'adim Vallis is located between the volcanic region of Tharsis,...
U.S. scientists said Thursday they discovered vast water glaciers under blankets of rocky debris on Mars, suggesting possible life beyond Earth. These results are the smoking gun, said Ali Safaeinili, a shallow-radar instrument team member with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The glaciers are the largest reservoir of water ice found on Mars that isn't at the polar caps, John Holt of the University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences wrote the journal...
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has revealed vast Martian glaciers of water ice under protective blankets of rocky debris at much lower latitudes than any ice previously identified on the Red Planet.Scientists analyzed data from the spacecraft's ground-penetrating radar and report in the Nov. 21 issue of the journal Science that buried glaciers extend for dozens of miles from the edges of mountains or cliffs. A layer of rocky debris blanketing the ice may have preserved the underground...
Scientists are now able to better explain why Mars's residual southern ice cap is misplaced, thanks to data from ESA's Mars Express spacecraft - the martian weather system is to blame. And so is the largest impact crater on Mars "“ even though it is nowhere near the south pole.Like Earth, Mars has frozen polar caps, but unlike Earth, these caps are made of carbon dioxide ice as well as water ice. During the southern hemisphere's summer, much of the ice cap sublimates, a process in which the...
New analysis of Mars' terrain using NASA spacecraft observations reveals what appears to be by far the largest impact crater ever found in the solar system.NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Global Surveyor have provided detailed information about the elevations and gravity of the Red Planet's northern and southern hemispheres. A new study using this information may solve one of the biggest remaining mysteries in the solar system: why does Mars have two strikingly different kinds of...
ESA -- The spectacular features visible today on the surface of the Red Planet indicate the past existence of Martian glaciers, but where did the ice come from? An international team of scientists have produced sophisticated climate simulations suggesting that geologically recent glaciers at low latitudes (that is near the present-day equator) may have formed through atmospheric precipitation of water-ice particles. Moreover, the results of the simulations show for the first time that the...
ESA -- This image, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA's Mars Express spacecraft, shows flow features most likely formed by glaciers or 'block' glaciers.This unusual 'hourglass'-shaped structure is located in Promethei Terra at the eastern rim of the Hellas Basin, at about latitude 38º South and longitude 104º East. A so-called 'block' glacier, an ice stream with a large amount of scree (small rocks of assorted sizes), flowed from a flank of the massif into a...
