NASA / JPL and the University of Arizona have released these beautiful new images of the largest canyon in the solar system: Valles Marineris on Mars. The gorge system is more than 4,000 km long and 7 km deep and is almost ten times longer and three times deeper than the Earth’s Grand Canyon. The images were captured on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter by the ultra-high resolution camera, HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment). From Space.com:
Unlike the Grand Canyon of the Earth, Valles Marineris was probably not carved out by billions of years of stormwater; the Red Planet is too hot and dry to ever accommodate a river large enough to cut through the crust – however, researchers from the European Space Agency (ESA) said there was evidence that flowing water was some of the gorge’s existing can deepen channels hundreds of millions of years ago.
A majority of the gorge had probably cracked open billions of years earlier, when a nearby supergroup of volcanoes known as the Tharsis region first erupted from Martian soil, the ESA said. While magma bubbled up under these monster volcanoes (including Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system), the earth’s crust could easily, according to ESA.
