Tithonium Chasma is a large canyon. With an astonishing length of 810 kilometers (503 miles), it is a large part of the Valles Marineris – the largest canyon system we know of in the entire solar system.
This close-up image of the chasm was taken back in 2013 by the high-resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and has just been presented as the HiRISE Image of the Day.
The image shows about a kilometer (0.6 miles) of Mars land, with tormenting hills and valleys, but as you can see in the other images, when you start to shrink, this is just a small section of a gigantic whole.
(NASA / JPL / UArizona)
But how did he get there? The Grand Canyon on Earth – which is five times shallower and 10 times shorter than the Valles Marineris – was carved by the Colorado River.
But scientists aren’t sure what formed the 8-10-kilometer (5-6.2-mile) deep canyon Valles Marineris and Tithonium Chasma, so they took pictures to try to find out.
We know that the inclination of the axis of Mars (called obliquity) is not as stable as that of the Earth, ranging widely from over 60 degrees to below 10 in the ancient past.
A cropped, uncolored version of the image above. (NASA / JPL / UArizona)
“It is possible, although unproven, that the greater obliquity has triggered the partial melting of some of the water ice on Mars,” wrote in 2014 HiRISE spokesman Edwin Kite.
“The best chance to understand this is to find piles of ice, dust, mud or sand that have accumulated over several cycles of change of obliquity.”
The image of Tithonium Chasma above shows these discoveries. The sediment layers – those dark, light stripes that run diagonally in the middle of the image – are relatively uniform, showing possible gradual accumulation of sediment over many long cycles of this change in axial tilt.
A map showing the location on Valles Marineris. (NASA / JPL / UArizona)
Even seven years after this photo was taken, we are still not sure why he created Valles Marineris. Some researchers suspect that a large tectonic “crack” could have split the surface of Mars, to be later improved by lava flow or water potential, if the axial tilt of the planet was correct.
But while these images are scientifically interesting to astronomers, they are also superb.
The astonishing scale of these peaks and gutters in other words, captured by a spacecraft 264 kilometers (163.8 miles) from the planet’s surface, cannot be underestimated.
You can see more pictures of Valles Marineris here.