Photos show Mars looks like the inside of a Mars bar (I can’t wait for the close-ups of Venus)
Growing old comes with various (and mostly predictable) disappointments. When I was a kid I would read all these SF stories, about space travel – wild adventures, with tough heroes and beautiful & scantily dressed heroines.
If, for instance, you’d have asked me to picture a Mars bar, I would have filled it with interesting folks: thieves, adventurers, space captains & stow-aways – with wenches, witches and Wonderwomen, some of them virtuous & virginal, others decidedly less so. There would be wonderfully exotic foodstuff and cocktails (and weaponry.)
But what a mars bar bloody sure wouldn’t look like was this:
Viewing these amazing new images of the Red Planet, you could be mistaken for thinking you were looking at the gooey insides of a Mars chocolate bar.
The 3D photographs were taken by a high resolution stereo camera (HRSC) on board the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter. The pictures show Hebes Chasma – an enclosed trough, almost five miles deep, in the Grand Canyon of Mars
The first image shows a flat-topped mountain located in the centre of Hebes Chasma. The second reveals that the mountain is made up of numerous rock layers stacked on top of each other. Scientists said the latest data provided strong evidence that water once existed in Hebes Chasma.
The 3D images taken by the HRSC provide scientists with invaluable data about the surface of Mars. It enables scientists to make a detailed examination of the altimetry of the planet’s surface, and to calculate the slope of its valleys. It also allows them to study the layer formation and calculate the masses of mountains.
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