Floor of Hellas Basin

Scaled Image

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/ASU

About this image

With a diameter of roughly 2000 km and a depth of over 7 km, the Hellas Basin is the largest impact feature on Mars. Because of its great depth, there is significantly more atmosphere to peer through in order to see its floor, reducing the quality of the images taken from orbit. This THEMIS image straddles a scarp between the Hellas floor and an accumulation of material at least a half kilometer thick that covers much of the floor. The southern half of the image contains some of this material. Strange ovoid landforms are present here that give the appearance of flow. It is possible that water ice or even liquid water was present in the deposits and somehow responsible for the observed landscape. The floor of Hellas remains a poorly understood portion of the planet that should benefit from the analysis of new THEMIS data.

Please see the THEMIS Data Citation Note for details on crediting THEMIS images. 

Context

Image ID: 
V03394003 (View data in Mars Image Explorer)
-37.4211
57.2364
3394
2002-09-19 15:41
Fri, 2002-09-27
VIS
1024 pixels (17 km)
3648 pixels (62 km)
0.017027 km/pixel
0.017151 km/pixel

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