NASA Mars Odyssey THEMIS Image: Arsia Mons Mosaic

Arsia Mons is the southernmost of the Tharsis volcanoes.

It is 270 miles in diameter, almost 12 miles high, and

the summit caldera is 72 miles wide. For comparison, the

largest volcano on Earth is Mauna Loa. From its base

on the sea floor, Mauna Loa measures only 6.3 miles high

and 75 miles in diameter. The image here is a mosaic of

several daytime IR images. The indentations on the SW

and NE sides align with the Pavonis Mons and Ascreaus

Mons to the NE. This may indicate a large fracture/vent

system was responsible for the eruptions that formed

all three volcanoes.

A Flash-based image viewer is available for this image.

[Source: ASU THEMIS Science Team]

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA’s Office of Space Science, 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.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Arizona State University