The European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter recently captured images revealing massive craters in Utopia, the most massive known impact basin in the Solar System.
A Gizmodo report specified that Utopia is approximately 2,050 miles wide, about the distance from London, England, to Alexandria, Egypt. These stunning geological features are situated in Utopia Planitia, a huge lava plain that is currently rich with ice, sitting on, and underneath its surface.
Essentially, Utopia Planitia is where the Zhuron rover of China also landed almost a year ago. The said rover spent its time driving around the vast plain, "taking selfies."
Mars Express has been orbiting the Martian planet since 2003, imaging the surface of Mars, mapping its minerals, identifying its tenuous atmosphere's composition and circulation, probing underneath its crust, and exploring the manner different phenomena are interacting in the Red Planet's environment.
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This image features a four km-wide impact crater formed on the rim of an older 15 km-wide crater on Mars.
Brain Terrain
One of the craters toward the bottom of the image has brain terrain within, so-named for its similarity to the ridges of the human brain. He can make out the undulating ridges within that crater if one looks closely.
There are numerous ideas about the origins of brain terrain. One leading principle is that the terrain originates from buried water that sublimates, weakening the surface of Mars and giving it a rippled appearance. It is difficult to deduce how the geological feature is forming from Martian orbit, although some brain terrain on this planet may offer hints.
A swath of darker material is found adjacent to the craters in the Mars Express images. Researchers at the ESA believe that icy ground cracked in places, enabling dust blowing around the planet to settle in the cracks.
Moreover, scalloped depressions are omnipresent throughout the captured image. These comprise circular to elliptical shapes, several tens of meters in depth, and with varying sizes from tens to thousands of meters all over.
Brain terrain is found throughout Mars' mid-latitude regions. What NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory website describes as "bizarrely terrain" may be directly linked to the water-ice underneath the surface.
Utopia Planitia
As specified in the ESA release, Utopia Planitia is an interesting region rich in ice. Ice has been spotted lying both under the surface, and at greater depths.
These were detected through observations of new craters and pits and by probing deep layers of the Red Planet using radar. Physically evident in this scene's left and right sides are large, smooth patches of surface called "mantled deposits."
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Two craters on a vast lava plain show how the planet's surface geology has changed over time.https://t.co/4qQrefj8tv#TECH #Technology #technews #programming #software
— HATINC (@HatProgrammers) March 30, 2022
These are thick layers of ice- and dust-rich material that had smoothed the surface and was possibly deposited as snow back when the rotational axis of Mars was much more tilted compared to what and how it is today, as was the last case, roughly 10 million years ago.
Moving back towards the image center, the two most massive impact craters seen are surrounded by double-layered mounds of material. An akin layered appearance is visible, too, in the deposits that have accumulated within the craters themselves, and in the thick rims of those craters.
Related information about Mars is shown on National Geographic's YouTube video below:
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Check out more news and information on Mars in Science Times.
