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Marineris

By comparison, Earth's natural wonder, the Grand Canyon , is only miles km long, 18 miles 30 km wide, and 1 mile 1.

Valles Marineris: Facts About the Grand Canyon of Mars

A windy channel on Venus, Baltis Valles, extends longer than the Martian system, as do a handful of rift valleys on Earth, which form along fault lines as the crust breaks apart. Valles Marineris stretches east-west just below the Martian equator. It starts in the west in the Noctis Labyrinthus , a system of maze-like valleys and canyons, and stretches around 20 percent of the planet to the chaotic terrain near the Chryse Planitia basin.


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The canyon system contains a number of different features that give clues to its formation. Collapse pits created by rushing water eating away at the land, massive floods, and seeping along canyon walls all point to water just at or beneath the surface at some point in the Martian history. Cracks in the crust, cliffs and walls, and landslides also exist along the expanse of Valles Marineris.

Valles Marineris formation

The vast canyon can be seen from Earth through a telescope as a dark scarring on the planet's surface. Features known as chasmata , steep depressions that resemble canyons on Earth, dominate the canyon.


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The canyon begins in the Noctis Labyrinthus on the western edge, a region of material thought to have volcanic origins. Two parallel chasmata, Ius and Tithonium, stretch eastward, and contain lava flows and faults from the Tharsis Bulge. Three more chasmata, Melas , Candor and Ophir, are connected on the east side of the parallel features.

Ancient Realms - Valles Marineris (December 2017)

Their floors contain eroded material and volcanic ash. The floor of the Melas chasma contains the deepest point of the canyon system. Coprates Chasma lies farther east, with well-defined layered deposits. These deposits may have formed from landslides or wind-blown material, although the region may once have housed isolated lakes. This canyon, one of the lowest points in Valles Marineris, boasts a handful of its own volcanoes, though they are small compared to Olympus Mons , the largest volcano in the solar system, and its neighbors.

The meter high cones were only recently identified. This is surprising, given that the bulk of Martian volcanism took place around 3. Eos and Ganges are another set of chasmata that contain volcanic or windblown deposits that have slowly eroded over time. The Valles Marineris system empties into the Chryse region, one of the lowest regions on Mars.

Any water from the canyon system would have flown into the lowlands, and it may have once contained an ancient lake or ocean. Over the years, scientists have proposed a number of theories about the formation of Valles Marineris. Erosion during a water-rich past and the withdrawal of subsurface magma were both early possibilities. Today, most scientists think that the formation of the Tharsis region may have helped the canyon to form.

Valles Marineris

The Tharsis region contains several large volcanoes that dwarf those found on Earth, including Olympus Mons. As molten rock pushed through the volcanic region to form the monstrous volcanoes 3. The strain cracked the crust, causing large faults and fractures across the planet's surface. The atmospheric pressure in such places may even be high enough for pools of water to exist — the ideal habitat for microorganisms, as we know from Earth.

These places, which are hard to get to, can only be explored with any efficiency by a robotic swarm," says Oliver Funke, leader of the DLR Space Administration elements of the project.

Valles Marineris - Wiktionary

The key technologies for dependable position finding with a swarm of airborne devices and rovers that do not rely on an infrastructure must first be researched and tested on Earth. This has potential for other uses, such as navigation underground or during search and rescue operations in regions devastated by catastrophes. But what form might such a mission scenario take?


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  7. A swarm is despatched from a base station to the target area. Upon arrival, it will need to navigate through the unknown terrain autonomously, reliably and accurately. Potential obstacles will need to be detected and bypassed or flown over.

    Characteristics

    The individual elements of the robotic swarm will need to be able to locate one another in order to orientate themselves while they are exploring the target area by means of cameras, laser scanners and measuring instruments. The orientation of the rovers will be improved by the better view from the airborne elements and the knowledge of their positional relationships. This can be extremely helpful both in the Valles Marineris on Mars and for catastrophes on Earth," says Funke, explaining the benefit of swarm navigation.

    Street maps quickly become useless for logistical purposes in a city devastated by an earthquake, because of the rubble. In this event, accessible routes for heavy machinery need to be found quickly. As soon as all the swarm elements are in place, a communication network used to transmit the data acquired about difficult terrain to all the swarm elements is established. The DLR Institute of Communications and Navigation is working on the technical solutions for this swarm communication and cooperation, and is building a Mars scenario simulator.

    The network established by the swarm provides redundancy for the exploration and data transfer as well as in the event of failure of individual swarm elements — but if several systems fail, these faults must be compensated for. But a large number of technological challenges will need to be solved before an airborne device can be used on Mars.

    Due to the lack of systems such as GPS or Galileo there, an airborne device has to rely on the terrain and on a limited number of onboard sensors for navigation. It takes 40 minutes for a radio signal to travel from Earth to Mars and back, so remote control via telemetry is out of the question. The airborne device must therefore be capable of exploring independently," says Funke.