Mars Odyssey orbiter captures volcano peeking above morning cloud tops

A brand new panorama from NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter exhibits one of many pink planet’s greatest volcanoes, Arsia Mons, poking via a cover of clouds simply earlier than daybreak.

Arsia Mons and two different volcanoes kind what is called the Tharsis Montes, or Tharsis Mountains, which are sometimes surrounded by water ice clouds (versus Mars’s equally frequent carbon dioxide clouds), particularly within the early morning. This panorama marks the primary time one of many volcanoes has been imaged on the planet’s horizon, providing the identical perspective of Mars that astronauts have of the Earth once they peer down from the Worldwide House Station.

Launched in 2001, Odyssey is the longest-running mission orbiting one other planet, and this new panorama represents the type of science the orbiter started pursuing in 2023, when it captured the primary of its now 4 high-altitude pictures of the Martian horizon. To get them, the spacecraft rotates 90 levels whereas in orbit in order that its digital camera, constructed to review the Martian floor, can snap the picture.

The angle permits scientists to see mud and water ice cloud layers, whereas the collection of pictures allows them to look at modifications over the course of seasons.

“We’re seeing some actually vital seasonal variations in these horizon pictures,” stated planetary scientist Michael D. Smith of NASA’s Goddard House Flight Middle in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It is giving us new clues to how Mars’s ambiance evolves over time.”

Understanding Mars’s clouds is especially vital for understanding the planet’s climate and the way phenomena like mud storms happen. That info, in flip, can profit future missions, together with entry, descent and touchdown operations.

Volcanic giants

Whereas these pictures concentrate on the higher ambiance, the Odyssey workforce has tried to incorporate fascinating floor options in them, as nicely. In Odyssey’s newest horizon picture, captured on Might 2, Arsia Mons stands 12 miles (20 kilometers) excessive, roughly twice as tall as Earth’s largest volcano, Mauna Loa, which rises 6 miles (9 kilometers) above the seafloor.

The southernmost of the Tharsis volcanoes, Arsia Mons is the cloudiest of the three. The clouds kind when air expands because it blows up the perimeters of the mountain after which quickly cools. They’re particularly thick when Mars is farthest from the solar, a interval referred to as aphelion. The band of clouds that types throughout the planet’s equator at the moment of yr is named the aphelion cloud belt, and it is on proud show in Odyssey’s new panorama.

“We picked Arsia Mons hoping we’d see the summit poke above the early morning clouds. And it did not disappoint,” stated Jonathon Hill of Arizona State College in Tempe, operations lead for Odyssey’s digital camera, referred to as the Thermal Emission Imaging System, or THEMIS.

The THEMIS digital camera can view Mars in each seen and infrared gentle. The latter permits scientists to determine areas of the subsurface that comprise water ice, which may very well be utilized by the primary astronauts to land on Mars. The digital camera may picture Mars’s tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, permitting scientists to research their floor composition.