Eberswalde (Mars crater)
| Mars crater Eberswalde | ||
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| Eberswalde (THEMIS) | ||
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| position | 24 ° 0 ′ S , 33 ° 0 ′ W | |
| diameter | 63 km | |
| history | ||
| Eponym | Eberswalde , Brandenburg | |
The Eberswalde crater is an impact crater on Mars . It is one of the important target areas for the search for traces of life on Mars, as remnants of a river delta have been discovered in its interior. The Eberswalde crater is located in the southern hemisphere of the planet at 24 ° south and 33 ° west. It was named after the city of Eberswalde in Brandenburg. He was discovered by Michael C. Malin and Ken Edgett .
The crater is slightly elliptical, its diameter is 65 kilometers. Mars explorers such as B. Timothy Parker of the California Jet Propulsion Laboratory suggest that its neighboring crater, the Holden Crater, and the Argyre Impact Basin were once connected by a river. After that, billions of years ago in the 900-kilometer Argyre Basin, the water level was kilometers high - until the floods overflowed and flowed northwards. The huge river system is said to have extended beyond the equator to Ares Valles, where the NASA Mars Pathfinder probe landed in a dry floodplain in the summer of 1997 .
The hypothesis that this mighty river was even longer than the Nile is controversial. The existence of liquid water in some parts of the proposed course is largely accepted. According to these ideas, a lake once filled the Eberswalde crater. Rubble and soil material entered this lake via a system of tributaries and were deposited there. In the area of the mouth, the sediments obstructed the water flowing in. Again and again the river split at the obstacles. Over time, a river delta was created from the labyrinth of standing and flowing rivers, including their embedded islands. The delta in the Eberswalde crater, like the Holden crater, was considered as one of several possible landing areas of the American mission Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) "Rover Curiosity". However, the Gale crater was chosen.
See also
literature
- Thorsten Dambeck: The Nile of the Red Planet . In: Astronomie heute , March 2008, pp. 45–48
