View of a heavily dendritic valley network on Mars
View of a heavily dendritic valley network on Mars
This image shows a system of dried-up, heavily dendritic river valleys east of the Huygens impact crater, which is over 450 kilometres in diameter. Such networks of valleys originated more than three and a half billion years ago, and therefore typically occur in the oldest, most heavily cratered regions of Mars, located in the southern highlands. The existence of such valley networks provides evidence that, at least in some periods, the planet must have had a different, most likely warmer and wetter climate, and probably even a water cycle. North is to the right in the image.
