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An image of a pupil-shaped crater found in the highlands of Mars was recently published in an official blog post by the European Space Agency (ESA). This eerie ‘pupil crater’ was hidden in the colorful landscape of Ionian Terra, a high Martian highland, and was captured by ESA’s Mars Express orbiter, the Mars Express lens.
This ‘Eyes Crater’, which looks like it’s staring at the probe, is 30km in diameter and was first photographed on April 25th. The interior of the crater has a darker color than the brighter periphery, giving the impression of looking into human eyes. The colors and outlines of the crater’s interior, captured by Mars Express’s High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), reveal the crater’s diverse materials and textured history.
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“The images of the marks, reminiscent of the veins flowing through the human eyeball, suggest that liquid water may have flowed across the surface of Mars about 3.5 to 4 billion years ago,” the ESA said.
This ‘pupil crater’ image has a resolution of about 14 meters per pixel, and is a color image that reproduces the color of the landscape when the human eye sees this region of Mars.
The ESA blog also includes color-coded terrain images. The lower parts of the surface are shown in blue and purple, and the higher parts are shown in white and red. The cone-shaped hills on the inner surface of the crater and other surrounding terrain are indications that the inner space of the ‘snow’ was filled with various materials.
Mars Express is Europe’s first Mars probe jointly created by ESA and Russian space scientists. It was launched aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket in June 2003. entered orbit. Mars Express orbits Mars, mapping the Martian surface while exploring the planet’s thin atmosphere. The spacecraft also found evidence of water on the surface of Mars during scientific work.
Kwang-Sik Lee, Science Columnist joand999@naver.com
