Soar above Mars' ravines and canyons in this fascinating Esa video

See Mars like never before in this Esa video highlighting the Mawrth Vallis ravine, an area thought to have once carried water on the Red planet.

The ravine is a 600 km-long, 2 km-deep outflow channel at the boundary of the southern highlands and the northern lowlands of Mars. The film, created using images taken by Esa’s Mars Express, starts at the mount of the channel in Chryse Planitia and heads towards the suspected source region in an area known as the Arabia Terra highlands.

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Mawrth Vallis, named because Mawrth is the Welsh word for Mars, is about 4 billion years old, characterised by its many impact craters which indicate its great age.

As the video zooms in, patches of light and dark deposits are revealed in the ravine. The light-toned deposits are among the largest outcrops of clay minerals, also known as phyllosilicates, on the planet and it is the presence of these minerals that indicate water once flowed in the Mawrth Vallis.

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As a result of the variety of water-bearing minerals – and with it, the possibility of traces of ancient life – Mawrth Vallis is a proposed candidate for the landing site for the ExoMars 2020 mission. The ill-fated Schiaparelli lander was supposed to be the first aspect of the mission to focus specifically on whether there has been life on Mars, but the lander crashed on the planet and was unable to carry out its mission.

The loss of the lander raised difficult questions for the next Esa follow-on missions, such as ExoMars 2020, which was already pushed back from its initial 2018 start date due to “delays in European and Russian industrial activities”.

However, seeing the beauty of Mars in this digital terrain model, derived from data collected by the Mars Express camera, hopefully Mawrth Vallis will be chosen as ExoMars’ landing site and we can start to learn more about the mysteries of the planet.