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Making Sense of Mars | The Mars Academy Episode 1

We are going to start making sense of Mars or at least build a foundation to build on.
Since Mars doesn't have oceans or vegetation, this is a poor way to study the planet.
My favorite way to study Mars is with an elevation map because it highlights all of the planet's amazing features.
Now, let's imagine Mars having enough water to fill to the zero-elevation point as it might have long ago.
Mars would have a vast ocean in the northern hemisphere and a massive lake in the southern hemisphere.
This is the broadest way to characterize Mars, by its two main regions called the Northern Lowlands and Southern Highlands.
The southern highlands have even more diverse topography compared to the lowlands with its densely cratered surface along with the Thaumasia Plateau and Tharsis Montes.
Scientists believe that the surface of the southern highlands is much older than the surface of the northern lowlands because of the disparity in crater density.
This assumption is based on what scientists discovered studying the craters on the moon, that at some point around 3.8 to 3.5 billion years ago, the rate of asteroid impacts dropped dramatically.
So, from here you can break down the planet's regions further in different ways.
The most common way is to refer to the planet's major regions.
We are going to cover the significant regions in great detail in the next episode, but today, we are going to focus on the Mars quadrangles called Mars Charts or simply, MC.
The Charts were established by the US Geological Survey and split Mars into 30 regions.
The numbering of the charts begins with MC-1 at the north pole and works its way south and then from west to east, ending with MC-30 at the south pole.
If we are talking about a chart between 1-15, you instantly know it's in the northern hemisphere.
Charts 1-7 lays out quite nicely except for MC-3, the charts on this row primarily represents the northern lowlands.
Then charts 8-23 are the regions that sandwich the equator, dominated by the Tharsis region on MCs 9 and 17.
Tharsis is a vast volcanic plateau containing the largest volcanoes in the solar system!
The plateau can get up to 7 km high, not counting the volcanoes themselves that are much taller.
Finally, charts 23-29 make up the mid-belt of the southern highlands dominated by the Hellas Basin between MCs 27-28.
Hellas is the third largest impact crater in the solar system.
It's over 7 km deep and about 2,300 km wide.
Going back to our thought experiment, if the Hellas were filled with water, it would make the great lakes seem like puddles.
Now there's one final layer to add before we wrap this up, and that's making sense of where the space probes are located.
We won't cover them all, but here are the more famous landers and rovers starting with the Soviet Union's Mars 2 lander.
Mars 2 crashed on Mars in 1971, becoming the first man-made object to impact the planet’s surface.
The exact site is unknown but is believed to have crashed on the western edge of the Hellas Basin in MC-27.
Then there's NASA's Viking 1, which was the second spacecraft to soft-land on Mars, landing on the west side of the Chryse Planitia on the edge of the transition zone on MC-10.
The great Pathfinder lander is located in Ares Vallis at MC-11 landing there in 1997.
Spirit and the legendary Opportunity are located on charts 23 and 19, landing on their respective sites in 2004.
Spirit shares MC-23 with the incredible Curiosity Rover, which landed in 2012.
The most recent probe to land on Mars is not too far away on the southwest corner of MC-15 with the InSight lander, which landed in 2018.
If everything goes according to plan, the Perseverance Rover will land on MC-13 on the Jezero crater on the western edge of the Isidis Basin in February 2021.
And with that, I hope you now have a more robust conception of Mars than you did before.
And I hope you build off this and continue to make sense of our fantastic planetary neighbor.