The images were taken on March 11, in which you can see part of the extension of the volcano, which covers 600 kilometers of Mars, and has a height of around 27 kilometers.
Photo: Courtesy NASA
NASA has released previously unseen images of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system that we know of so far. The photographs were taken by the Mars Odyssey Mission, which has been out of orbit for 23 years in search of information about our Milky Way.
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The image was taken on March 11, in which you can see part of the extension of the volcano, which covers 600 kilometers of Mars, and has a height of around 27 kilometers. In the words of Jeffrey Plaut, a member of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, what can normally be seen of Mount Olympus are small strips from above, “but, when we turn the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, we can see in a single image how big the volcano is and how it rises above the landscape.”
According to NASA, this is part of an effort by the scientists behind the mission who, months ago, decided that the probe would focus on taking high-altitude photographs of Mars. The first of them, for example, was published at the end of 2023, which is part of the collection of information necessary for future missions with humans on board to reach the red planet.
In the image, a blue-white band can be seen, indicating the amount of dust present in the atmosphere at the beginning of autumn, when dust storms usually arise on the planet. Other violet bands would also indicate a mixture of red dust with clouds of water and ice. Finally, at the top of the image, a blue-green band can be seen, where the ice clouds reach 50 kilometres in height.
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On June 30, the Mars Odyssey Mission will complete 100,000 trips around Mars since its launch in 2001. Since then, it has been key to future trips that, it is expected, will be manned by humans to carry out high-caliber research in the Martian surface.
Regarding the success formula for the probe to have been maintained for so long, its director, Joseph Hunt, stated that this is due to careful monitoring of the historical schedule of scientific planning and execution, together with innovative engineering practices. “We look forward to collecting more great science in the coming years,” he concluded.
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