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If placed on Earth, Valles Marineris would span the width of North America. [36] In places, the canyons are up to 300 km wide and 10 km deep. Often compared to Earth's Grand Canyon, the Valles Marineris has a very different origin than its tinier, so-called counterpart on Earth. The Grand Canyon is largely a product of water erosion.
The asteroid belt is located between Mars and Jupiter. It is made of thousands of rocky planetesimals from 1,000 kilometres (621 mi) to a few meters across. These are thought to be debris of the formation of the Solar System that could not form a planet due to Jupiter's gravity.
The maps below were produced by the Mars Global Surveyor ' s Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter; redder colors indicate higher elevations.The maps of the equatorial quadrangles use a Mercator projection, while those of the mid-latitude quadrangles use a Lambert conformal conic projection, and the maps of the polar quadrangles use a polar stereographic projection.
The planets are, in order of distance from the Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. There are three main belts of minor bodies: The asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. The Kuiper belt beyond Neptune, followed by the scattered disc. The Oort cloud in the boundaries of the Solar System.
Areography, also known as the geography of Mars, is a subfield of planetary science that entails the delineation and characterization of regions on Mars. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] Areography is mainly focused on what is called physical geography on Earth; that is the distribution of physical features across Mars and their cartographic representations.
Mars is located closer to the asteroid belt, so it has an increased chance of being struck by materials from that source. Mars is more likely to be struck by short-period comets, i.e., those that lie within the orbit of Jupiter. [103] Martian craters can have a morphology that suggests the ground became wet after the meteor impact. [104]
The most conspicuous feature of Mars is a sharp contrast, known as the Martian dichotomy, between the Southern and the Northern hemispheres.The two hemispheres' geography differ in elevation by 1 to 3 km.
Extra-close oppositions of Mars happen every 15 to 17 years, when we pass between Mars and the Sun around the time of its perihelion (closest point to the Sun in orbit). The minimum distance between Earth and Mars has been declining over the years, and in 2003 the minimum distance was 55.76 million km, nearer than any such encounter in almost ...