NASA Mars Odyssey THEMIS Image: Hydraotes Chaos 08-18-2004

Image Context:


Context image credit: NASA/Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) Team
[ Find on map: Javascript version ]

[ Find on map: CGI version ]

The THEMIS Image of the Day will be exploring the nomenclature of Mars for the next three weeks.

Hydraotes Chaos

• Chaos: distinctive area of broken terrain
• Hydraotes: Alexander the Great attacked the Mallains

  on the banks of the Hydraotes River (today’s

  Ravi River) during his conquest of India.

Hydraotes Chaos is typical of chaos regions on Mars. Note

the break up of the plateau into smaller mesas separated

by deep valleys. In some chaos, the mesas also seem

to get fractured into smaller and smaller segments.

Nomenclature Fact of the Day: A person must be deceased for at

least three years before his/her name can be used for

a planetary feature.

[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