Tithonium Chasma is a large gorge. The incredible 810 kilometers (503 miles) long is a large part of Valles Marineris – the largest gorge system we know of in the entire solar system.
This close-up image of the chasma was taken in 2013 by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and was just displayed as the HiRISE Picture of the Day.
The image shows about a mile (0.6 miles) of Martian terrain with torturous hills and valleys, but as you can see in the other images, it’s just one small part of a giant whole when you start zooming out.
(NASA / JPL / UArizona)
But how did it get there? The Grand Canyon on Earth – which is five times shallower and ten times shorter than the Valles Marineris – has been carved by the Colorado River.
But scientists do not know what would have formed the deep gorge of 8- to 10 kilometers from Valles Marineris and Tithonium Chasma, so they took pictures to try to figure it out.
We know that the tilt of the axis of Mars (called the inclination) is not as stable as the earth, and in the ancient past ranged from more than 60 degrees to below 10.
An uncut, uncolored version of the picture above. (NASA / JPL / UArizona)
“It is possible, though unproven, that higher inclination caused partial melting of some of Mars’ water ice,” Edwin Kite, spokesperson for HiRISE, wrote in 2014.
“Our best chance of understanding this is to find heaps of ice, dust, silt or sand that have accumulated over many cycles of oblique change.”
The image of Tithonium Chasma above shows these findings. The sediment layers – the dark and light stripes that run obliquely in the center of the image – are relatively uniform and possibly show the gradual build-up of sediments during very long cycles of this axial oblique change.
A map showing the location on the Valles Marineris. (NASA / JPL / UArizona)
Even seven years after this photo was taken, we are still not sure what the Valles Marineris created. Some researchers suspect that a large tectonic ‘crack’ may have divided Mars’ surface to improve later by lava flow, or possibly water, if the planet’s axial tilt were just right.
But even though these images are scientifically interesting to astronomers, they are also just beautiful.
The staggering scale of these other peaks and troughs, captured by a spacecraft 264 kilometers (163.8 miles) from the planet’s surface, really can not be underestimated.
You can see even more photos of the Valles Marineris here.