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 much like how astronauts in a hypothetical orbiting house station would possibly view the behemoth mountain. It is 373 miles (600 kilometers) huge — concerning the dimension of Arizona — and 17 miles (27 kilometers) tall. That is over twice as excessive as industrial airliners fly. “Usually we see Olympus Mons in slender strips from above, however by turning the spacecraft towards the horizon we will see in a single picture how massive it looms over the panorama,” NASA’s Odyssey challenge scientist, Jeffrey Plaut, stated in a press release. “Not solely is the picture spectacular, it additionally gives us with distinctive science information.”By quantity, the Martian volcano is 100 occasions bigger than Earth’s largest volcano, Hawaii’s Mauna Loa. If one have been to summit this mountain, the curvature of the Crimson Planet could be seen.
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The huge panorama picture, seen within the imagery under, reveals sprawling Olympus Mons at backside with its caldera (a collapsed pit) atop the volcano. As you’ll be able to see, it isn’t a sharply peaked mountain, however is a steadily sloping “defend volcano,” much like the Hawaiian volcanoes. It was fashioned by progressive lava flows, as thick oozing lava layered upon earlier lava flows.Above Olympus you’ll be able to see three colourful bands. The underside bluish-white band is mud within the Martian environment, because the Crimson Planet’s large mud storms had begun choosing up in March, when the picture was taken. The purple layer is probably going a mixture of water-ice clouds and purple 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
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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 digicam confronted the horizon relatively than peering down on the floor.
Past capturing such a novel view of the Crimson Planet, Odyssey has now revamped 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.