Shows the elevation of the martian landscape.
red = hill, blue = valley
the big blue crater at 60°E, 45°S is probably an old impact crater from an asteroid and is 4 km deep!
The highest mountain on Mars is olympus mons at 20°N, 130°W with an altitude of 21 km above planet-wide average.
Source: NASA, Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter
Also we have a whole Mars community here: [email protected]
In case you want to know more about the planet, please feel free to ask :)
Whenever I see an elevation map of Mars I can’t help but see that one entire hemisphere is lower and the other higher, and I wonder if maybe we just misjudged the correct location of the middle. Maybe something to do with the gravitational center vs the volumetric center. I’m sure there’s more to it, but I always find it striking, and never have seen an explanation of what feels like a discrepancy to my intuition.
Fun fact, Olympus Mons is so wide and its slope so gradual that you would never be able to see the whole thing from a distance and would scarcely even know you were walking uphill were you to climb it.
I bet a participant in the tour de, er, Mars would notice. It’s what’s called a “vals plat” in Dutch, a stretch that seems flat but is surprisingly hard to cycle on.
Like living somewhere coastal where it feels like you have a headwind going to and from work.
I think the slope would be the least of your concerns if you found yourself cycling around mars
You have to have one of those little baggies with repair stuff on the back of your saddle.
I’d bring a phone too. Then you could see which stores are open to get a bite at. Because biking is tiring!
Kinda wild how relatively boring a map is when there’s no evident tectonics
I enjoyed playing maps in Civ 4 based on Mars relief maps. Fun times. I hope every version of the game gets maps like those
It looks like Mars was impacted by something that bumped out Olympus Mons but erosion made the crater a bowl and the mountain a bump. Probably something we won’t solve until we’re on Mars but something neat to think about.
