Sunrise over water on Mars
Water on Mars. Computer artwork looking east over water in Melas Chasma canyon at sunrise on Mars 3.5 billion years ago. Mars is now a desert world, but erosion features seen on Mars today suggest that water once flowed there. The water was lost due to the thin Martian atmosphere and weak gravity. Melas Chasma canyon is part of Valles Marineris, an enormous crack in the Martian crust hundreds of kilometres wide and thousands of kilometres long. The topography of this artwork was drawn with Terragen software, using data from the laser altimeter on the Mars Global Surveyor probe.
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