Mars-Orbiting Spacecraft Captures ‘Snaking Scar’ Across the Base of Enormous Volcano

A high-resolution camera strategy aboard the Mars Express Orbiter has returned stunning images of “snaking” gashes crossed the ft of Arsia Mons, 1 of the reddish planet’s monolithic volcanoes.

The European Space Agency (ESA) clocked Mars’ deep, uneven scar astatine astir 373 miles agelong (600 km) — making it astir one-and-a-third times the magnitude of the Grand Canyon. Humans archetypal documented the diagnostic successful 1930, and formally dubbed it Aganippe Fossa 46 years later.

“The structure, named aft a outpouring nymph successful Greek mythology, puzzles adjacent today’s experts,” said the German Aerospace Center, which developed the stereo camera aboard the 21-year-old Mars Express spacecraft. The bureau added, “Some theories suggest that the trench is tectonic successful origin, portion others assertion that volcanic veins formed during a precocious play of activity,” creating scar-like depressions crossed some rocky and mildly sloping terrain.

For its part, the ESA said Aganippe Fossa apt developed arsenic “magma rising underneath the colossal wide of the [nearby] Tharsis volcanoes caused Mars’s crust to agelong and crack.”

A closeup of the snaking scar connected the reddish satellite © ESA/DLR/FU Berlin

In summation to the basal of Arsia Mons — which stretches astir 2 km higher than Earth’s tallest volcano — Aganippe Fossa’s gashes transverse done gigantic, marble-like patterns created via “windblown particulate and sand,” according to the ESA.

The bureau captured the diagnostic stereoscopically, which means you tin view it (and its neighboring volcano) successful 3D, if you hap to person red-blue oregon red-green glasses handy.

Mars’ Aganippe Fossa captured successful 3D © ESA/DLR/FU Berlin