Terra Cimmeria Crater

Today's VIS image shows a complex crater located in Terra Cimmeria, just north of Hesperia Planum. The floor of this unnamed crater has features indicating a substantial amount of crater fill material was deposited at some point after the formation of the crater. These materials have since been eroded into multiple different forms. There are valley and mesa forms in the bottom part of the crater in this image, with the valleys becoming more shallow and channel-like toward the northern part of the crater floor. It is thought that the formation of the valley and mesa formation (called chaos terrain) arises from the release of subsurface fluids.

Orbit Number: 90328 Latitude: -8.81454 Longitude: 112.309 Instrument: VIS Captured: 2022-04-25 21:52

Please see the THEMIS Data Citation Note for details on crediting THEMIS images.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) was developed by Arizona State University, Tempe, in collaboration with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote Sensing. The THEMIS investigation is led by Dr. Philip Christensen at Arizona State University. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the prime contractor for the Odyssey project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.