Everything about the possibility of life space seems to interest us right now. Perhaps that has to do with the way this year has been panning out. And there is more good news, with a new video of a beautiful icy crater on Mars released by the European Space Agency has given fresh hope to finding life on the Red Planet, and also that this could be a source of water. The visuals were taken by the ESA’s Mars Express and show the 82 km wide Korolev crater on Mars. This crater is also 1.8km deep, which makes it a large reservoir of non-polar ice on the planet.
The ESA says in the northern lowlands of the Red Planet, south of the large Olympia Undae dune field that partly surrounds Mars’ north polar cap. They say this crater is filled with ice round the year and is stable. “Water ice is permanently stable within Korolev crater because the deepest part of this depression acts as a natural cold trap. The air above the ice cools and is thus heavier compared to the surrounding air: since air is a poor conductor of heat, the water ice mound is effectively shielded from heating and sublimation," says the ESA.
The agency says the movie has been created using an image mosaic made from single orbit observations from the High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on Mars Express. The mosaic combines data from the HRSC nadir and colour channels. The nadir channel is aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, as if looking straight down at the surface. The mosaic image was then combined with topography information from the stereo channels of HRSC to get what we see as a three-dimensional landscape of Mars.
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