THE European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter has released its first image of the Red Planet: a landscape gashed with valleys in a section of the solar system’s grandest canyon, Valles Marineris.
Taken from 275 kilometres above the surface, the colour portrait shows details as small as 12 metres across in a patch of land 65 kilometres across. The island-shaped mesas, mountain ridges, and valleys in what is now dry terrain just south of the Martian equator were probably carved by ancient glaciers, says Agustin Chicarro, Mars Express project scientist. Streaks of white along the sides of ridges and mesas…
