We love soaring videos from other worlds. These impressive videos, created from images collected by spacecraft in orbit, can give us an idea of what it would be like to fly in a plane on another planet.
This latest video from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft offers a breathtaking view of one of the most amazing craters on Mars.
This film was created using images from the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC).
The images are typically taken looking down (nadir), and the video combines surveying information from the HRSC stereo channels to generate a three-dimensional landscape, which was then recorded from different perspectives, such as with a film camera, to render the flight. shown in the video.
The Korolev crater is 82 kilometers (50 miles) wide and at least 2 km (1.25 miles) deep. This well-preserved crater is located in the northern lowlands of Mars, just south of a large patch of dune-filled terrain that surrounds part of the planet’s northern polar cap (known as Olympia Undae).
Aerial view of the Korolev crater on Mars. (ESA / DLR / FU Berlin)
You are not seeing snow, but this crater is constantly filled with water ice, and its central mound is approximately 1.8 kilometers (1.1 miles) thick throughout the year. It is one of the largest non-polar ice deposits on Mars.
This view reminds me of a flight I took where I flew over Meteor Crater in Arizona, USA But for comparison, Meteor Crater is less than a mile wide (.737 miles / 1,186 km) and only 560 feet (170 m) from depth.
You may be thinking, how can this ice remain stable in the Korolev crater? Doesn’t water ice sublimate in the thin atmosphere of Mars?
Like dry ice here on Earth, water ice on Mars generally goes from solid to gas at low atmospheric pressure. (Mars is about 8 millibars, while the average atmospheric pressure at sea level on Earth is 1013.25 millibars, or about 14.7 pounds per square inch.)
But temperature can also influence ice stability. Water ice is permanently stable within the Korolev Crater because the deepest part of this depression acts as a natural cold trap.
ESA scientists explain that the air on the ice cools and is therefore heavier compared to the surrounding air: since air is a poor conductor of heat, the mound of water ice is effectively protected against heating and sublimation.
The name of the crater may be familiar. It is named after the Russian rocket engineer and spacecraft designer Sergei Pavlovich Korolev (1907-1966). He developed the first Russian R7 intercontinental rocket, the forerunner of the modern Soyuz rockets that are still in operation today.
With his rocket and spacecraft design, he was also responsible for the first man-made satellite (Sputnik in 1957) and the first human space flight (Yuri Gagarin in 1961).
Find out more about Mars Express and the Korolev crater here and here.
Here’s a list of the flyover videos we’ve posted on Universe today.
This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.
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