Highlands near Pyrrhae Regio on Mars
Highlands near Pyrrhae Regio on Mars
The most striking landscape feature on Mars is the almost 4000-kilometre-long Valles Marineris, just north of the equator. In the east, at Eos Chasma, the up to ten-kilometre-deep canyon system merges into a network of wide outflow channels which extend a further one-and-a-half thousand kilometres to the north and were created three to four billion years ago by episodic, catastrophic flash floods. The headwater regions of these valleys often contain ‘chaotic areas’, which were formed when subsurface ice thawed and flowed away. The resulting cavities collapsed, the energy-rich water masses took large amounts of eroded material with them, leaving behind a ‘chaotic’ pattern of mesas – the remnants of the original plateau. At Pyrrhae Regio, DLR’s HRSC instrument recorded such a chaotic area during Mars Express orbit 20,972.
