🌌 SpacePicture of a Day: Ares 3 Landing Site: The Martian Revisited 🪐
This close-up from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera shows weathered craters and windblown deposits in southern Acidalia Planitia. A striking shade of blue in standard HiRISE image colors, to the human eye the area would probably look grey or a little reddish. But human eyes have not gazed across this terrain, unless you count the eyes of NASA astronauts in the sci-fi novel, "The Martian," by Andy Weir. The novel chronicles the adventures of Mark Watney, an astronaut stranded at the fictional Mars mission Ares 3 landing site, corresponding to the coordinates of this cropped HiRISE frame. For scale, Watney's 6-meter-diameter habitat at the site would be about 1/10th the diameter of the large crater. Of course, the Ares 3 landing coordinates are only about 800 kilometers north of the (real life) Carl Sagan Memorial Station, the 1997 Pathfinder landing site.
HD image: LINK 🛸
Copyright: No copyright 🔭
Project Website: LINK 🚀
| Name | Craft |
|---|---|
| Oleg Kononenko | ISS |
| Nikolai Chub | ISS |
| Tracy Caldwell Dyson | ISS |
| Matthew Dominick | ISS |
| Michael Barratt | ISS |
| Jeanette Epps | ISS |
| Alexander Grebenkin | ISS |
| Butch Wilmore | ISS |
| Sunita Williams | ISS |
| Li Guangsu | Tiangong |
| Li Cong | Tiangong |
| Ye Guangfu | Tiangong |
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