Snapshot
March 08, 2010
A digital terrain model generated from a stereo pair of images provides this synthesized, oblique view of a portion of the wall terraces of Mojave Crater in the Xanthe Terra region of Mars, just north of the planet's equator. Here's a nice high resolution version. The image was made by the High Resolution Imagine Science Experiment, or HiRISE, aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. While the entire crater measures 37 miles across and 1.6 miles deep, the portion shown here represents a 2.5-mile-wide section of the crater's northwestern edge. Its vertical dimension is exaggerated three-fold compared with the horizontal to show the ponding of material backed up behind massive blocks of bedrock. These "pitted ponds" are thought to have formed when material melted by the crater-causing impact was captured behind the wall terraces. Mojave is one of the most recent, large impact craters on Mars, having formed about 10 million years ago.
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