Fly across Nili Fossae with ESA’s Mars Express

Mars’s surface is covered in all manner of scratches and scars. Its many marks include the fingernail scratches of Tantalus Fossae, the colossal canyon system of Valles Marineris, the oddly orderly ridges of Angustus Labyrinthus, and the fascinating features captured in today’s video release from Mars Express: the cat scratches of Nili Fossae.

Nili Fossae comprises parallel trenches hundreds of metres deep and several hundred kilometres long, stretching out along the eastern edge of a massive impact crater named Isidis Planitia.

This new video features observations from Mars Express's High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). It first flies northwards towards and around these large trenches, showing their fractured, uneven appearance, before turning back to head southwards. It ends by zooming out to a ‘bird’s eye’ view, with the landing site of NASA’s Perseverance rover, Jezero Crater, visible in the lower-middle part of the final scene. (You can explore this crater further via ESA’s interactive map.)

The trenches of Nili Fossae are actually features known as ‘graben’, which form when the ground sitting between two parallel faults fractures and falls away. As the graben seem to curve around Isidis Planitia, it’s likely that they formed as Mars’s crust settled following the formation of the crater by an incoming space rock hitting the surface. Similar ruptures – the counterpart to Nili Fossae – are found on the other side of the crater, and named Amenthes Fossae.

Scientists have focused on Nili Fossae in recent years due to the impressive amount and diversity of minerals found in this area, including silicates, carbonates, and clays (many of which were discovered by Mars Express’s OMEGA instrument). These minerals form in the presence of water, indicating that this region was very wet in ancient martian history. Much of the ground here formed over 3.5 billion years ago, when surface water was abundant across Mars. Scientists believe that water flowed not only across the surface here but also beneath it, forming underground hydrothermal flows that were heated by ancient volcanoes.

Because of what it could tell us about Mars’s ancient and water-rich past, Nili Fossae was considered as a possible landing site for NASA’s Curiosity rover, before the rover was ultimately sent to Gale Crater in 2012. Another mission, NASA’s Perseverance rover, was later sent to land in the nearby Jezero Crater, visible at the end of this video.

Mars Express has visited Nili Fossae before, imaging the region’s graben system back in 2014. The mission has orbited the Red Planet since 2003, imaging Mars’s surface, mapping its minerals, studying its tenuous atmosphere, probing beneath its crust, and exploring how various phenomena interact in the martian environment. For more from the orbiter and its HRSC, see ESA's Mars Express releases.

Disclaimer: This video is not representative of how Mars Express flies over the surface of Mars. See processing notes below.

Processing notes: The video is centred at 23°N, 78°E. It was created using Mars Chart (HMC30) data, an image mosaic made from single-orbit observations from Mars Express’s HRSC. This mosaic was combined with topography derived from a digital terrain model of Mars to generate a three-dimensional landscape. For every second of the movie, 62.5 separate frames are rendered following a pre-defined camera path. The vertical exaggeration is three-fold. Atmospheric effects – clouds and haze – have been added, and start building up at a distance of 50 km.

Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin & NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

#ESA #Mars #Satellite

[oddtherapy]

It's incredible that we get to see images of such a distant world in high resolution and this video has only a few thousand views .. I don't understand humanity.

[BlackVoidAA]

This was a pretty cool video! We need more mars guides like this

[ktkrelaxedscience]

Thank you very much. Brief, to the point, and stock full of info. 😃 Mars Express has been awesome for such a long time now!

[treefarm]

It's good to be able to learn about different areas of Mars.

[MioDenSmarta.]

ESA is the coolest space agency ever! Are there more Mars and other missions? If so, give the link because I can't really find more

[jmcastlevania]

Je trouve vraiment regrettable que l'Agence Spatiale Européenne, dont le siège est situé à Paris, ne propose pas plus de contenu en languages français. Les contenus sont de qualité mais pas accessibles aux plus petits.

[jimslimm]

Hopefully ESA will publish a version that represents what Mars Express or we might see during a flyover, instead of inserting unwanted text between us and the surface of the planet. ESA did do a good job with their video "Fly over Neukum crater, " though. That lets you feel like you are looking out of the window of your spacecraft rather than watching a closed caption documentary on a video screen.

[occamsrayzor]

This was excellent, but somewhat marred by the subtitles. Sadly, I'm one of those people who struggle with NOT reading them, which constantly draws my attention away from the visuals.

[babylovr]

If got one way ticket to Mars I would rather volunteer because tired living in earth. 😂

[saadibnasaadhusain]

Wait did they put a UAV on Mars before NASA’s helicopter?

[JesusIsAboveAllOtherNames]

May I ask why you guys believe this to be actual Mars footage when it's just really good computer graphics? I don't understand.

[stronzer]

Pretty sure a saw a $100 bill at 13 secs