04/03/2026
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Craters, craters, and but extra craters: this snapshot from ESA’s Mars Specific is packed filled with them, every as fascinating because the final.
This view of the Pink Planet – taken by Mars Specific’s Excessive Decision Stereo Digital camera – reveals a slice of Arabia Terra, a big plain in Mars’s historic highlands. This a part of Mars is understood for being closely pockmarked with craters, every shaped as an area rock hurtled inwards to collide with the planet.
Historic floor
The glut of craters seen right here isn’t any shock. Arabia Terra is actually historic. In consequence, it’s had a lot of time so as to add to its spectacular crater assortment – between 3.7 and 4.1 billion years, in truth.
The principle picture above reveals only a few of those. Some are crammed with strikingly darkish materials, others are dwelling to lighter sands and rippling dunes, whereas but others present indicators of collapsing partitions and worn-away rims.
Probably the most distinguished crater seen within the picture, extending out of body to the bottom-right, is Trouvelot Crater. This crater is round 130 km throughout, and reveals indicators of being very outdated: it has a rim that has lengthy since began to crumble away, uneven inside ‘terraced’ partitions which have collapsed below their very own weight over time, and a variety of smaller overlapping and overlaid craters which have shaped for the reason that creation of Trouvelot Crater itself.
These, and different, options are all clearly labelled in the event you click on on the picture. Make sure to have a look to simply discover options of curiosity and discover this intriguing panorama intimately.
Dark and volcanic
To the left of Trouvelot Crater sits another basin that appears to be even older and more eroded, with a wall that’s almost completely worn away. Trouvelot cuts through this crater, further indicating that this more deteriorated crater companion was there first.
The floor of this more ancient crater is nearly entirely covered in dark rock, which is rich in minerals such as magnesium, iron, pyroxine and olivine (known as ‘mafic’ rock, and often created by volcanism). These volcanic rocks may have been thrown up by crater-forming impacts, and later moved around as winds swept across the terrain and gravity pulled material down crater walls.
The other large craters seen here – and across Arabia Terra, beyond the edges of this frame – have similar dark deposits on their floors or walls, indicating that these processes are widespread across this part of Mars.
In Trouvelot Crater, the dark material has been shaped by wind into rippling dunes known as ‘barchan’ dunes. These are characteristically sickle- or crescent-shaped, and created when winds predominantly blow in one direction. Mars Express has spotted barchan dunes on Mars before, such as in the planet’s north polar region and near the large volcanic province of Tharsis.
From dark to light
Sitting amid the dark material in Trouvelot Crater is a sign that other processes have been at play here: a light-toned mound around 20 km long and covered in ridges and grooves.
Such mounds have been spotted elsewhere on Mars – in the nearby Becquerel crater, for example, as seen by Mars Express in 2013 and 2014. They typically show signs of minerals that have come into contact with, or formed in the presence of, water, and are usually far lighter than their surroundings.
Water is thought to play a key role in how the mounds themselves form, too, but this is still a topic of debate. The mounds may have formed in a lake or sea in Mars’s past. Alternatively, layers of light-toned rock may have gradually built up as water in and below the martian surface (‘groundwater’) swelled upwards to mix with wind-swept sediments on the crater floor.
Decades of Mars exploration
This image was captured by one of eight instruments aboard Mars Express: the High Resolution Stereo Camera. The Mars orbiter has been exploring Mars’s many landscapes since it launched in 2003. It has mapped the planet’s surface at unprecedented resolution, in colour, and in three dimensions for over two decades, returning insights that have drastically changed our understanding of our planetary neighbour (read more about Mars Express and its findings here).
The Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) was developed and is operated by the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR). The systematic processing of the camera data took place at the DLR Institute of Space Research in Berlin-Adlershof. The working group of Planetary Science and Remote Sensing at Freie Universität Berlin used the data to create the image products shown here.
