Mars

Outer space has always fascinated me.  And now with digital mapping we get amazing photographs like this one of the Mojave Crater in the Xanthe Terra region of Mars, taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.  I hope to visit some day.

From nasa.gov . . .

"Mojave Crater is approximately 37 miles in diameter. The portion of its northwestern edge shown here spans about 2.5 miles in width halfway between the bottom and top of the image. Mojave is one of the freshest large craters on Mars. A survey of its features indicates very few overprinting craters on them, and an analysis of that infrequency suggests the crater may be as young as about 10 million years, very young for a crater of this size. The depth of the crater -- about 1.6 miles -- also demonstrates that Mojave has experienced little infilling or erosion.

"Mojave gives us a glimpse of what a very large complex crater looks like on Mars. In a sense, it is a "Rosetta Stone" of craters, given that it's so fresh and most others - especially this size - have been affected by erosion, sedimentary infilling and overprinting by other geologic processes. Such fresh craters give insight into the impact process: ejecta, melt-generation, deposition, etc.

"Mojave's fans and channels are most intriguing. They hint that impacts such as Mojave's may have unleashed water or water-ice from the subsurface to flow across the surface and, perhaps, condense as rain or snow for a brief period of Martian time. This further suggests that early climate on Mars could have been heavily influenced by the intense bombardment about 3.9 billion years ago when impacts creating craters Mojave's size and far larger were more common."