December 16, 2002
The elements that make you — the calcium in your bones, the oxygen in your lungs — were scattered across space by dying stars long before...
Night and Day in Melas Chasma on Mars
Birthday · December 16, 2002
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APOD published December 16, 2002. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
What types of terrain are found on Mars? Part of the answer comes from thermal imaging by the robot spacecraft 2001 Mars Odyssey currently orbiting Mars. The above picture is a superposition of two infrared images, a black and white image taken during Martian daylight and a false-color image taken at night. For the daytime image, dark colors mean cool temperatures, dropping from about -5 degrees Celsius to low as -35 degrees Celsius. Shadowed regions appear particularly dark, while grooved structure on the floor of Melas Chasma indicates successively overlapping landslides. In the nighttime swath, blue areas have cooled relatively quickly, indicating a composition of fine-grained dust and sand.