Image mosaic of Korolev Crater on Mars
Image mosaic of Korolev Crater on Mars
The well-preserved Korolev impact crater is located in the Martian northern lowlands, which surround the North Pole ice cap. The crater floor, which lies two kilometres beneath the crater rim, is covered in a 1800-metre deposit of water ice all year round. The domed ice forms a glacier comprising around 2200 cubic kilometres of non-polar ice on Mars. That is about 50 times the volume of Lake Constance and is comparable in size to the Canadian Great Bear Lake. The crater is named after the renowned Russian rocket designer Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. With his rocket and spacecraft design, Korolev was responsible for the first man-made satellite of Earth Sputnik in 1957, and for the first human spaceflight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961 on Vostok 1. The image is a mosaic made up of five individual images acquired by the DLR-operated HRSC stereo camera on board the ESA Mars Express orbiter.