ESA has shared an amazing piece of footage, carefully reconstructed, showing the mighty Korolev crater of Mars, a likely future source of water for human settlers, should we ever get there.
The remarkable video is actually a moving mosaic that combines scans of the planet’s surface with topographic data, captured by a high-resolution stereo camera aboard the Mars Express probe, to produce a 3D landscape.
The video was produced at a resolution of 21 meters per pixel and shows the full extent of the 82-km-wide (50-mile) Korolev crater in the northern lowlands of Mars. The crater is ice-filled year-round as its floor is two kilometers (1.2 miles) below its rim, making it a natural cold trap that protects ice from the elements.
The Mars Express orbital mission launched on June 2, 2003, reaching the Red Planet six months later and transmitting incredible images of the planet since then. It is the second spacecraft with the longest survival and continuous activity in orbit around an alien world, second only to NASA’s Mars Odyssey 2001.
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The crater itself was named in honor of the Soviet chief rocket engineer and spacecraft designer Sergei Pavlovich Korolev (1907-1966), nicknamed the father of Russian space technology for his contributions to the Russian R7 intercontinental rocket.
Korolev’s designs put Sputnik into orbit in 1957 and sent Yuri Gagarin into space in 1961, and now future generations of navigators and explorers are transmitting images of the Martian crater that bears his name, with impressive details worthy of his great achievement.
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