Explore Mars with JMARS
Introducing Mars
From Earth, Mars looks like a small reddish star. Find mars below and find Mars in your sky tonight.
in middle USA
With a telescope, Mars looks a bit rusty brown. Why?
Mars is often portrayed in bright colors to show features like elevation, temperature, or material. Computer programs assign colors to the pixel data ranges, like painting-by-numbers. Colors can help us recognize patterns that have meaning. Fun Practice
In this colorized elevation map, the color key from the highest elevation to lowest elevation progresses from white to brown, red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, and dark blue. Since there is no ocean for zero elevation, scientist use an average Mars radius as zero (yellow).
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arizona State University
What Has Been Discovered on Mars? The Red Planet's Geography
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksvhwB5ZBD8
A 12 minute intro video by Kosmo 10/24/2021
Take the Mars Feature Quiz
To get your “Mars bearings,” match some of the more prominent features on Mars, from the labeled sphere-shaped maps, showing 180 degrees of latitude each, to the flat map showing more than 360 degrees latitude, from left to right: 220 deg E to 180 deg E
1. ____ Olympus Mons: tallest volcano in the solar system ~21 km tall. (hint: white is tall)
2. ____ Valles Marineris Longest “Grand Canyon” in the solar system. It is as long as from the East coast to the west coast of the USA.
3. ____ Tharisis Montes, 3 large volcanoes in a row.
4. ____ Isidis Planitia, a large northern hemisphere crater (blue), important because it helps locate Jezero Crater
5. ____ Jezero Crater, site of the Perseverance landed February 2021
6. ____ Hellas Planitia, location of lowest elevation on Mars about -9 km deep (hint: dark blue is deep)
7. ____ Pattern starts repeating. 10.5°N, 342.25°E
1G,2C,3D,4F,5B,6A,7E
Two more maps that will help you find your way around Mars are the quadrangle map and a more fully labeled topographic map (same page scroll down). There are many other Mars Landmarks. You can learn how to access them in JMARS.
You also may need to refer to the Mars' geologic history below. Scientists' best evaluation about past life on Mars is based on a past wet and warmer climate and an unchanged Mars for the last 3500 million years. Mars minerals indicate that during the Noachian time period it was warmer and wetter. (Marpedia and Wikipedia). More
credit for charts: Matt Balme The Geology of Mars
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