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The common surface features of Mars include dark slope streaks, dust devil tracks, sand dunes, Medusae Fossae Formation, fretted terrain, layers, gullies, glaciers, scalloped topography, chaos terrain, possible ancient rivers, pedestal craters, brain terrain, and ring mold craters.
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun.The surface of Mars is orange-red because it is covered in iron(III) oxide dust, giving it the nickname "the Red Planet". [22] [23] Mars is among the brightest objects in Earth's sky, and its high-contrast albedo features have made it a common subject for telescope viewing.
The polar ice caps are well-known telescopic features of Mars, first identified by Christiaan Huygens in 1672. [42] Since the 1960s, we have known that the seasonal caps (those seen in the telescope to grow and wane seasonally) are composed of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) ice that condenses out of the atmosphere as temperatures fall to 148 K, the ...
Named after the Roman god of war, it is often referred to as the "Red Planet" [1] [2] because the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance. Mars is a terrestrial planet with a thin atmosphere, having surface features reminiscent both of the impact craters of the Moon and the valleys, deserts, and polar ice caps of Earth.
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.
The first astronomer to name Martian albedo features systematically was Richard A. Proctor, who in 1867 created a map (based in part on the observations of William Rutter Dawes) in which several features were given the names of astronomers who had been involved in mapping Mars. In some cases, the same names were used for multiple features.
The geological history of Mars can be broadly classified into many epochs, but the following are the three major ones: Noachian epoch (named after Noachis Terra): Formation of the oldest extant surfaces of Mars, 3.8 billion years ago to 3.5 billion years ago. Noachian age surfaces are scarred by many large impact craters.
[5] [6] As with other albedo features on Mars, the name Cydonia was drawn from classical antiquity, in this case from Kydonia (Ancient Greek: Κυδωνία; Latin: Cydonia), a historic polis (city state) on the island of Crete. [7] Cydonia contains the "Face on Mars", located about halfway between the craters Arandas and Bamberg. [4]