National Air and Space Museum Image Detail

3-D visualization of the buried Marte Vallis channels (Fig. 2)

3-D visualization of the buried Marte Vallis channels beneath the Martian surface. Marte Vallis consists of multiple perched channels formed around streamlined islands. These channels feed a deeper and wider main channel. Please note the surface has been elevated, and scaled by a factor of 1/100 for clarity. The color scale represents the elevation of the buried channels relative to a Martian datum (Note: the reason the values are negative is because the elevation of the surface of Mars in this region is also a negative – below average global elevation).

Image Number: WEB12777-2013
Credit: Smithsonian Institution/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Sapienza University of Rome/MOLA Team/USGS
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Large JPEG (692 x 1000 pixels)

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