When was mars created

By comparison, the Grand Canyon is only km mi long and nearly 2 km 1. Valles Marineris was formed due to the swelling of the Tharsis area, which caused the crust in the area of Valles Marineris to collapse. It is 10 times longer and 10 times wider than the Grand Canyon. Mars also has sand on its surface, made up from basaltic rock, thus having a grey color. When the wind blows, dunes are created including series of parallel ridges in crater floors, also horseshoe-shaped dunes are created.

Mars also has dust devils, towering vortices of wind similar to tornadoes. When the dust devils blow the red dust around on the greyish basaltic plains, they can leave behind complex and beautiful curlicues. Mars actually has avalanches.

Cliffs towering above the surface that hold different materials can be dislodged in the spring when carbon dioxide thaws, creating tremendous cascades of rock and dust. Mars has only 2 known moons named Phobos and Deimos after the horses that pulled the chariot of the god of war Mars. They are very small though, Phobos has a diameter of about 25 km or They look very much like asteroids and it is strongly believed that they have been captured by Mars gravity from the nearby asteroid belt.

Phobos orbits Mars only 6. Tides from Mars are also altering its orbit, slowly lowering Phobos closer and closer to the surface. It is believed that in a few million years Phobos will drop low enough that it will actually enter the atmosphere and impact the surface.

On June 7, , NASA announced that the Curiosity rover had discovered organic compounds in sedimentary rocks dating to three billion years old, indicating that some of the building blocks for life were present. In July , scientists reported the discovery of a sub-glacial lake on Mars, the first known stable body of water on the planet. It sits 1. Out of all the planets in the Solar System, Mars appears to have the highest change of having life forms but still the conditions are harsh enough that nothing should be able to survive there, perhaps only beneath the surface.

Still, regardless of its habitability now, Mars was definitely once a planet filled with oceans and the right conditions of life.

Most people would be happy if we could only find evidence of life that may have existed on the Red Planet. Future astrobiology missions are planned, including the Mars and Rosalind Franklin rovers.

They have the mission to take soil samples and return them to Earth for further analysis. There are many plans for Mars, including terraforming and sending people on it, but it remains to be seen, hopes are high and missions continue. Scientists have found tiny traces of Martian atmosphere within meteorites violently ejected from Mars, then orbiting the solar system amongst galactic debris for millions of years, before crash landing on Earth.

Home » Planets » Terrestrial Planets » Mars. However, the first person to observe Mars with a telescope was Galileo Galilei in It is named after the Roman god of war due to its red appearance. In different cultures, Mars represents masculinity, youth and its symbol is used as the symbol for the male gender.

Mars is Mars has a radius of 3. Mars has a volume of 1. Mars has a density of 3. Mars has seasons though they last longer than on Earth since Mars takes longer to orbit the Sun. But for several reasons, seasons on Mars are different from those on Earth. For one, Mars is on average about 50 percent farther from the sun than Earth is, with an average orbital distance of million miles.

This means that it takes Mars longer to complete a single orbit, stretching out its year and the lengths of its seasons. On Mars, a year lasts The primary driver of modern Martian geology is its atmosphere, which is mostly made of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and argon. By Earth standards, the air is preposterously thin; air pressure atop Mount Everest is about 50 times higher than it is at the Martian surface.

Despite the thin air, Martian breezes can gust up to 60 miles an hour, kicking up dust that fuels huge dust storms and massive fields of alien sand dunes. Once upon a time, though, wind and water flowed across the red planet. Not so today: Though water ice abounds under the Martian surface and in its polar ice caps, there are no large bodies of liquid water on the surface there today.

Mars also lacks an active plate tectonic system, the geologic engine that drives our active Earth, and is also missing a planetary magnetic field. But in the ancient past—up until about 4. What shut down the Martian dynamo? Scientists are still trying to figure out. The peak is so massive, it curves with the surface of Mars. If you stood at the outer edge of Olympus Mons, its summit would lie beyond the horizon. The gorges span about 2, miles and cut up to 4. The valleys get their name from Mariner 9, which became the first spacecraft to orbit another planet when it arrived at Mars in About 4.

The highlands of the southern hemisphere, however, are studded with many extinct volcanoes, and the crust there can get up to 62 miles thick. What happened? At some point in the distant past, the red planet gained its two small and irregularly shaped moons, Phobos and Deimos. The two lumpy worlds, discovered in , are named for the sons and chariot drivers of the god Mars in Roman mythology.

How the moons formed remains unsolved. But recent models instead suggest that they could have formed from the debris flung up from Mars after a huge impact long ago. Deimos, the smaller of the two moons, orbits Mars every 30 hours and is less than 10 miles across. Its larger sibling Phobos bears many scars, including craters and deep grooves running across its surface. Scientists have long debated what caused the grooves on Phobos.

Since the s, humans have robotically explored Mars more than any other planet beyond Earth. Currently, eight missions from the U. But getting safely to the red planet is no small feat. The hemispheres of Mars are very different. The rugged Southern Highlands record the long history of impact events.

The Northern Lowlands also are heavily cratered, but somethng has covered or buried most of them. Scientists are unsure exactly why the north and south are so different. Perhaps the craters have been filled by lava flows or covered by sediment, or eroded by flowing water.

This is one of the big mysteries about the Martian surface. For more information on impacts and craters, visit Impact Cratering. The northern lowlands are about four kilometers lower in elevation than the more heavily cratered highlands of the southern hemisphere. Image and caption courtesy of Planetary Science Research Discoveries. Volcanism in a Big Way. Early Mars was volcanically active, spewing lava across its surface, and water and carbon dioxide into its atmosphere. Much of this early history, recorded in the older Southern Highlands, is obscured by impact craters.

From about 3. Tharsis is a huge bulge in the crust, capped by prominent volcanos. Some scientists suggest the bulge overlies a region of hotter than normal mantle. The high temperatures allowed the development of numerous large volcanos.

These volcanos thickened the crust, causing Tharsis to be higher than other parts of Mars. The crust was pulled apart to form the immense canyon of Valles Marineris more than 3 billion years ago. Geological Survey. Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in our solar system, began forming about 1 billion years ago. Scientists do not really know how young the most recent volcanic activity is on Mars.

Certainly, some volcanos have erupted in the last million years. Some lava flows are so fresh and have so few craters, that they may be less than , years old. It is likely that some martian volcanos will erupt again in the future. Olympus Mons, and the other volcanos of the Tharsis region, are times more massive than volcanos on Earth!

These volcanos are so large because Mars' outer layer does not move relative to the mantle underneath — the surface of Mars is stationary.

The volcanos remain over chambers of molten rock and grow as lava flow after lava flow after lava flow pours out of the interior, each adding to the volcano. For more information on volcanism, please visit Volcanism.

Olympus Mons upper left and volcanos on the Tharsis bulge. The white features are clouds. Moving Plates. There is no evidence that plate tectonics — the movement of rigid plates lithosphere on a mobile upper mantle asthenosphere — is occurring now on Mars. Mars lacks the pattern of features, such as chains of volcanos, long ridges, or folded mountains, that would be expected if plate tectonics were occurring or recent.