13.11.07

The Grandest Canyon


From the Viking mission of the 1970s comes this staggering image of Valles Marineris: the largest canyon in the Solar System at over 3000 km long and up to 8 km deep.

The other notable canyon of immense size - that we know of - is, of course, Ithaca Chasma on Saturn's moon Tethys, at 2000km long and 3 to 5 km deep. Earth, by comparison, only sports a small crack of 446 km in length somewhere on its northern hemisphere.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ours may be small - but it's still rather breathtaking. I can't even imagine what the view of a canyon THAT size must be like - of course, it might be rather devastatingly breathtaking, given the lack of atmosphere 0_0