Page 8 - Hellas Planitia News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

HiRISE photo of the Hellas Planitia region shows a lonely, layered butte feature that point to the impact basin having had a lake long ago

It might be a bit difficult, but try imagining Mars with vast oceans and raging rivers, and why not, perhaps even touches of green vegetation from place to place. If somehow you can place that image into your head, hold on to it, as it is nothing but a glimpse into the history of the planet.

They call it Hellas Planitia, and to our best knowledge, it occupies a place in the top five largest impact craters in the Solar System. It’s also home to “an enigmatic formation” called banded terrain, to use the phrasing of the scientists studying the planet.

There are a number of “biggest” features that can be found on Mars. Some are the biggest in the solar system, like the Valles Marineris, the longest and deepest canyon we know of, or the Hellas Planitia, a Western Europe-sized impact crater, and the largest one we’ve noticed so far.

Mars has fascinated us for millennia. Almost from the time astronomers first turned their telescopes on the planet shining in the night sky, we've imagined life there. Unlike our other planetary neighbor, Venus, which remains shrouded in cloudy mystery, the red planet has invited speculation and exploration. Since the 1960s, the U.S. and the Soviet Union and, later, Russia and Japan, have launched spacecraft destined to land on or orbit Mars. The successful missions, like the very first Mars flyby in 1964 by the U.S. Mariner 4, have provided a treasure trove of data and, of course, introduced...