Verily, You Were Not That Great of a Door Either

wigmund:

heortewyrm:

spaceexp:

Grand Canyon vs Mariner Valley.

damn this makes the grand canyon look like a stupid piece of shit

For more Mars geography shenanigans, Olympus Mons is almost the size of France (600 km wide) and is about 21-25 kilometers tall depending on whether you measure it from base level or from Martian “sea level”. Only Rheasilvia on the asteroid Vesta is taller

We aren’t able to land anything on Olympus Mons because there’s not enough atmosphere above it to slow down a probe’s descent before parachutes would be safe to open.

Also Mars has the largest known impact craters in the Solar System - Utopia Planitia which is 3,300 km across and Hellas Planitia which is 2300 km across and 7 km deep.

There’s some debate that the entire northern hemisphere of Mars is another impact basin (40% of the planet) from the collision of something that may have been 1600 to 2700 km across. A massive impact would explain some oddities about Mars’ northern hemisphere and the origins of its moons Phobos and Deimos