Tithonium Chasma is one big gap. At a staggering 810 kilometers (503 miles) in length, it is a large part of Valles Marineris – the largest canyon system known in the entire solar system.
This close-up photo of the chasma was taken in 2013 by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and was just seen as the HiRISE photo of the day.
The image shows about a kilometer (0.6 miles) of Mars terrain with torturous hills and valleys, but as you can see in the other images, when you start to zoom out, this is only a small part of a gigantic whole.
(NASA / JPL / UArizona)
But how did it get there? The Grand Canyon on Earth – which is five times shallower and ten times shorter than the Valles Marineris – was carved by the Colorado River.
But scientists aren’t sure what would have formed the 5 to 10-kilometer-deep canyon of Valles Marineris and Tithonium Chasma, so they took pictures to find out.
We know that the tilt of Mars’ axis (called the tilt) is not as stable as that of Earth, ranging from more than 60 degrees to less than 10 in the ancient past.
An uncropped, uncolored version of the above image. (NASA / JPL / UArizona)
“It is possible, although unproven, that a higher slope caused some of the water ice on Mars to partially melt,” HiRISE spokesman Edwin Kite wrote in 2014.
“Our best chance to understand this is to find piles of ice, dust, silt or sand that have accumulated over many cycles of slope change.”
The image of Tithonium Chasma above shows these findings. The sediment layers – those dark and light stripes that run diagonally through the center of the image – are relatively uniform and may show the gradual build-up of sediments over many long cycles of this axial tilt change.
A map showing the location on the Valles Marineris. (NASA / JPL / UArizona)
Even seven years after this photo was taken, we still don’t know what created the Valles Marineris. Some researchers suspect that a large tectonic “crack” split the surface of Mars, later amplified by lava flow, or possibly water if the planet’s axial tilt was just right.
But really, while these images are scientifically interesting to astronomers, they are also just beautiful.
The astounding scale of these other peaks and troughs, captured by a spacecraft 264 kilometers (163.8 miles) from the planet’s surface, really cannot be underestimated.
You can see more photos of the Valles Marineris here.