7 years of the rover Curiosity on Mars: seven amazing things you have discovered on the red planet
last June, the high resolution camera of the Mars Express captured many images of one pole to the other. Now, three months later, the Space Agency International (ESA) and the Centre Aerospace German (DLR) have made public the results: a striking image that displays with a resolution a few times to view the red planet.
full Image captured by the Mars Express – ESA / DLR
The top of this stunning global view of Mars showing the northern hemisphere with the North Pole still extended in winter . A thin veil cloudy extends over the low-lying valleys adjacent, which are partially covered with dark sand. If you look at the center of the image, there is an edge of the ground: marking the boundary between the northern lowlands and southern highlands of Mars. The dark sand also cover areas of the highlands covered with craters.
At the south end of the image, you can still see a part of the white clouds wrapped in Hitting Hells Hellas . The view of the planet is slightly “tilted” toward the south, so that it is possible to a view of the North Pole but not the South Pole. From pole to pole of Mars has a diameter of 6.752 miles , and the image that is displayed covers a little less than 5,000 miles .
The winter martian
During the winter in the northern hemisphere, the intense cold causes them to precipitate significant amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere over the North Pole. This forms a thin layer on the layer polar permanent, which otherwise is predominantly water ice. This layer of ice extends to approximately 50 degrees north . The content of water vapor in the martian atmosphere, which could freeze to form ice and water to fall to the surface as snow or ice, is extremely low.
the image data were acquired at the beginning of spring in the north. The polar night in the North Pole had ended, and the polar cap, which had grown during the winter, it began to recede gradually. This growth and contraction could also be seen in the polar cap south. The thin band of white clouds (probably made of crystals of water ice) is one of the many that appear in the northern hemisphere at this time of year.
Huge plains
The plains are red from Saudi Terra and Terra Sabaea in the center of the image are notable for the presence of many large impact craters, indicating that it is among the regions with the most ancient of Mars. Along its northern border there is a scarp striking, with a difference of several kilometers of height. This separates the flat plains , just with craters in the northern lowlands from the southern highlands, which have many more craters. This remarkable change in the field, known as the dichotomy on mars, marks a division topographical and key regional on Mars.
This is reflected in the different thicknesses of the cortex, but also extended to the magnetic properties of the crust and its gravitational field. There is still scientific debate about how it came about this dichotomy of the crust : although from the forces of “endogenous” in the interior of Mars and, therefore, have been caused by convection in the mantle, or tectonic; or by forces “outside” were responsible, this effect could perhaps be attributed to one or more major impacts of asteroids.
A planet frozen in time
The geological processes (volcanism, tectonics, water activity and ice) have been stuck on Mars. Today, the changes that can be observed at the surface are mainly caused by the shift induced by the wind of the dark sand . Although these sands, which are of volcanic origin, are vast fields of dunes, in depressions such as impact craters, often also deposited on other large areas, which makes parts of the planetary surface have a dark appearance. The displacement of the dunes can be seen during a period of one or two years using data from high-resolution images.
on the other hand, the changes in the layers of sand of area wide they take much more time. When the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) mapped for the first time, Mars in 1877, during a period in which the observation conditions were particularly favorable, changes in the distribution of light surfaces and dark on Mars that is able to monitor over a longer period of time. Then, it was believed that the movement of the dark areas was caused by seasonal changes in the vegetation cover, so that it was thought that life existed on the red planet.
