Fly around Schiaparelli Crater with Mars Express
ESA's Mars Express spacecraft has produced a new flyover animation of Schiaparelli Crater, one of the largest craters on Mars. Measuring 460 km across, the crater appears relatively shallow, likely because it has been filled in over billions of years by wind-blown sediment, water-deposited material, lava, or a combination of all three. The crater is named after Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835–1910), who studied Mercury and Venus but is best known for his observations of Mars.
During the Great Opposition of 1877, when Mars passed close to Earth, Schiaparelli mapped the planet and perceived several straight dark lines across the surface. He assumed these were natural water-filled channels and used the Italian word 'canali'. Others interpreted this as 'canals', implying artificial structures, leading many to believe they were built by intelligent Martians. We now know these 'canali' were optical illusions from the relatively poor telescopes of the time, and there are no water-filled channels on Mars today. However, water is believed to have once been present in this region, possibly forming a lake. Schiaparelli Crater also holds a place in popular culture as the final destination of astronaut Mark Watney in Andy Weir's novel 'The Martian'.
The film was created using data from Mars Express's High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The image mosaic, centered at 8°S/17°E, is combined with topography from a digital terrain model to create a 3D landscape. For each second of the movie, 50 separate frames are rendered along a predefined camera path. The vertical exaggeration is three-fold, and atmospheric effects such as clouds and haze, which begin building at 250 km distance, have been added to conceal the limits of the terrain model. The HRSC is operated by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), with data processing at the DLR Institute for Space Research in Berlin-Adlershof. The film was created by the Working Group of Planetary Science and Remote Sensing at Freie Universität Berlin using these data.