NASA Spacecraft Orbiting Mars Captures Image of Giant Ancient Volcano Just Before Dawn
The perspective is what astronauts would see out their window if there was an International Space Station flying around the red planet
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NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which has been orbiting the Red Planet for over two decades, has captured a spectacular landscape image of a giant ancient volcano called Arsia Mons just before dawn. In the image, taken on May 2, the striking landform rises out of a sea of clouds just below the planet's pale green atmosphere.
“We picked Arsia Mons hoping we would see the summit poke above the early morning clouds. And it didn’t disappoint,” Jonathon Hill, a researcher from Arizona State University who leads operations for Odyssey’s camera, says in a statement. The camera is called the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS).
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The image is the first of any of the three volcanoes that make up Mars' Tharsis Mountains (also known as Tharsis Montes). As opposed to traditional satellite imagery, the image's perspective represents what astronauts aboard a theoretical International Space Station (ISS) in orbit around Mars could see if they looked toward the horizon. In fact, the Odyssey spacecraft orbits Mars at about the same altitude as the ISS flies around Earth, as reported by Mashable's Elisha Sauers.
Since 2023, the Odyssey mission has been capturing similar landscape images to study the Martian atmosphere, particularly dust and water ice cloud layers. The feat requires the spacecraft to rotate 90 degrees from its normal position.
“We’re seeing some really significant seasonal differences in these horizon images,” planetary scientist Michael D. Smith from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center explains in the statement. “It’s giving us new clues to how Mars’ atmosphere evolves over time.”
Measuring a whopping 12 miles high—roughly equivalent to an over-5,800-story building, per CBS, and about twice as tall as Earth's largest volcano, Mauna Loa—Arsia Mons is one of Mars' biggest volcanoes. As if that wasn't impressive enough, the Tharsis region as a whole hosts some of the biggest volcanic structures of our Solar System, Iain Todd writes for BBC's Sky at Night Magazine.
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In the early morning, the Tharsis Mountains are usually enveloped in water ice clouds (Mars also has carbon dioxide clouds). The clouds occur when air rushes up the volcanoes' slopes, cooling and condensing into visible vapor, and are particularly dense when Mars is at aphelion—the farthest point along its orbit from the Sun. Clouds provide insight into the planet's weather, as well as events such as dust storms.
At certain times of the year, the air might also turn into frost on the volcanoes' calderas, a phenomenon detailed in a Nature Geoscience study published in 2024.
“Understanding the present day water cycle on Mars in the atmosphere and near surface will be important for future exploration missions including human ones where water will be the key in situ resource,” John Bridges, a planetary scientist at the University of Leicester, told the Guardian's Ian Sample last June. Indeed, the THEMIS camera's infrared light capabilities also helps researchers pinpoint regions of underground water ice, which might one day become an important source of water.
In March, Elon Musk announced his plan to send humans to Mars as early as 2029. It remains to be seen if and when humanity will truly achieve a multi-planetary existence.
