Mars Express Captures 460-Km Schiaparelli Crater in New 3D Video

Q: How does the newly mapped reality of Schiaparelli Crater challenge the famous survival landscape depicted in The Martian?

The new mapping suggests Schiaparelli Crater is less like the dramatic survival basin imagined in *The Martian* and more like a broad, partly buried ancient landscape. ESA’s images show that Schiaparelli, despite being one of Mars’ biggest impact craters, is now relatively shallow because billions of years of sediment, volcanic material, windblown dust and impact debris have filled it in. That undercuts the idea of a sharply defined, rugged bowl-shaped trap. Instead, the crater appears as a vast, softened basin with subdued relief. The 3D topography also emphasizes that the surrounding Southern Highlands were shaped by ancient water flow and may even once have hosted a lake. That gives the setting a much older geological story than a simple hostile backdrop for survival. In other words, the real Schiaparelli is scientifically richer but less cinematic: an eroded, infilled record of early Mars rather than a stark, pristine disaster landscape. The new data do not make Watney’s fictional stranding impossible, but they do refine the terrain. A person on the ground would likely encounter a more gradual and sediment-smoothed environment, embedded in a heavily cratered highland region, rather than the kind of sharply dramatic crater interior many readers may have pictured from the novel and film.

3 articles · Updated · Space.com · Aug 20

A low pass over Mars' Southern Highlands let ESA's Mars Express record detailed new footage of Schiaparelli Crater, one of the planet's largest impact basins.
The 460-km-wide crater sits in terrain shaped by flowing water about 3.7 billion years ago, when Mars is thought to have had a warmer, wetter climate.
ESA said Mars Express used its High Resolution Stereo Camera to scan five viewing angles across four color bands, producing 3D renderings during the flyover.
Those low-orbit swaths—stretching hundreds to thousands of miles—are stitched into regional maps that feed increasingly detailed models of the Martian globe.
Schiaparelli is unusually shallow for its size because windblown sediment, ancient water deposits, volcanic material and impact debris gradually filled what was once a deeper crater.