Mars crater featured in ‘The Martian’ is wider than the Seoul-to-Busan distance

The European Space Agency has released high-resolution footage of Schiaparelli Crater, the enormous Martian basin featured in the novel and film “The Martian.” The video came from the Mars Express spacecraft’s High Resolution Stereo Camera during a low-altitude pass.

Schiaparelli is one of Mars’s largest impact craters, measuring 460 kilometres across, considerably longer than the distance between Seoul and Busan. Despite its size, the crater is relatively shallow. The ESA said windblown sediment, water, lava, or a combination of the three may have filled it over billions of years.

The footage uses multiple viewpoints to recreate the landscape in three dimensions. It shows terrain shaped during an ancient Martian climate that was warmer and wetter, including wrinkle ridges and dark streaks. The ridges formed as layers of material, including lava, accumulated, cooled and contracted. The dark streaks may consist of volcanic ash deposited after past eruptions.

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Probably filled in by windblown sediments, water, lava, or a combination of all three over the past few billion years.

Schiaparelli Crater is the place where fictional astronaut Mark Watney boards a rescue spacecraft in “The Martian.” In Andy Weir’s 2011 novel and the 2015 film adaptation, Watney drives 3,200 kilometres from Acidalia Planitia to reach the crater, where the Ares 4 rescue mission has landed.

The crater takes its name from 19th-century Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli. During Mars’s close approach to Earth in 1877, he observed dark lines and called them “canali”, meaning channels. The term was mistranslated into English as “canals”, helping fuel speculation about advanced life on Mars. The ESA said the lines were an optical illusion produced by the weaker telescopes of the time. Mars Express, launched in 2003, continues building a detailed three-dimensional map of the planet’s surface.

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Canali