NASA captured an expansive view of the biggest volcano recognized to humanity.
The house company used its 23-year-old Mars Odyssey orbiter to seize a never-before-seen view of Olympus Mons — a vista just like how astronauts in a hypothetical orbiting house station may view the behemoth mountain. It is 373 miles (600 kilometers) large — in regards to the measurement of Arizona — and 17 miles (27 kilometers) tall. That is over twice as excessive as business airliners fly.
“Normally we see Olympus Mons in narrow strips from above, but by turning the spacecraft toward the horizon we can see in a single image how large it looms over the landscape,” NASA’s Odyssey challenge scientist, Jeffrey Plaut, stated in an announcement. “Not only is the image spectacular, it also provides us with unique science data.”
By quantity, the Martian volcano is 100 instances bigger than Earth’s greatest volcano, Hawaii’s Mauna Loa. If one have been to summit this mountain, the curvature of the Pink Planet could be seen.
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The large panorama picture, seen within the imagery beneath, reveals sprawling Olympus Mons at backside with its caldera (a collapsed pit) atop the volcano. As you possibly can see, it isn’t a sharply peaked mountain, however is a steadily sloping “protect volcano,” just like the Hawaiian volcanoes. It was fashioned by progressive lava flows, as thick oozing lava layered upon earlier lava flows.
Above Olympus you possibly can see three colourful bands. The underside bluish-white band is mud within the Martian environment, because the Pink Planet’s large mud storms had begun selecting up in March, when the picture was taken. The purple layer is probably going a mixture of water-ice clouds and pink mud. And the highest blue-green layer consists of water-ice clouds (they attain 31 miles, or 50 kilometers, excessive).
Olympus Mons captured by NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter on March 11, 2024.
Credit score: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU
The Odyssey spacecraft arrived at Mars in 2001, with the first mission of detecting water ice buried close to Mars’ floor and observing different Martian environs. To achieve this angle, NASA engineers fired thrusters to reorient the spacecraft so its digital camera confronted the horizon reasonably than peering down on the floor.
Past capturing such a singular view of the Pink Planet, Odyssey has now remodeled 100,000 orbits round Mars, and has snapped a whopping 1.4 million photos.
The solar-powered craft is now the longest-operating mission round one other planet. Godspeed, Odyssey.
