'Beauty is everywhere': NASA shares rare image of 'dried up' channel on Mars; see picture

“Beauty is everywhere,” the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Monday, 6 September 2021, described as it shared the image of the grey coloured textured surface’s close up from the section of Ma'adim Valles. The image was taken from the outflow channel that begins in the southern lowlands and flows northward into the Gusev crater, the home of the MER Spirit rover. Located in Terra Cimmeria, the channel is 700km (435 miles) long, with widths up to 20 km (12 miles) and depths to 2 km (1.2 miles) in places, according to NASA’S Mars Exploration Program. 

“Just as water and lava can leave their marks on a landscape, the wind is also an extremely powerful and erosive force. Wind shapes the surface of the Red Planet as these striking images of Maadim Vallis outflow channel on Mars demonstrates,” the space agency wrote in an Instagram post. “The lines and colours in this photo taken from NASA’s High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are almost reminiscent of an abstract painting,” NASA further said. 

On Mars, flowing lava often carves textured paths that resemble the riverbeds and canyons etched by water, similarly, one of the largest valleys in the Martian highlands Ma'adim Valles shows many overlapping, highly degraded, and deeply buried impact craters with inconsistent basaltic infilling and rugged texture caused due to the erosion. Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres explains the geomorphology of the region stating that the area on Mars was actually originated by the catastrophic overflow of a large paleolake. When abandoned by the basin stream, as per scientific hypothesis, the Ma’adim Vallis debouched to Gusev crater, 900 km to the north, the landing site for the Spirit Mars Exploration Rover. 

[Ma'adim Valles channels meets the Gusev Crater. Credit: NASA]

[This VIS image shows a small section of Ma'adim Valles. Ma'adim Valles is an outflow channel that starts in the southern lowlands and flows northward into the Gusev crater. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU]

Air fall deposition along Ma'adim Valles on Martian surface 

There are traces of the erosion of the intermediate basin mostly concentrated along the eastern pathway.  There has been subsequent “air fall deposition, impact gardening, tectonism, and limited fluvial erosion,” as per the scientists. NASA describes the Gusev Crater as the “dried-up lake bed” on Mars. “There's not much doubt: this site contained a body of liquid water, at least for some amount of time,” says Jim Garvin, NASA's Lead Scientist for Mars Exploration. The region formed three to four billion years ago when an asteroid crashed just south of Mars’ equator. “It's hard to imagine the landscape looking this way unless water was somehow involved,” Garvin said in a NASA science release.