Xanthe Terra Region of Planet Mars: Simulated Fly Over | ESA Mars Express

Xanthe Terra Region of Planet Mars: Simulated Fly Over | ESA Mars Express

The European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft takes us on a flight over curving channels carved by water, islands that have resisted erosion, and a maze of hilly terrain. Central to the tour is a 1300 km-long outflow channel called Shalbatana Vallis. It cascades down from the highland region of Xanthe Terra to the smoother lowlands of Chryse Planitia.

Billions of years ago, water surged through this channel, creating many of the features we see today. The tour culminates in a spectacular view of a 100 km-wide impact crater, smashed out of Mars’s surface when it collided with a space rock.

Xanthe Terra is a large area on Mars, centered just north of the Martian equator. Its coordinates are 3°N 312°E and its diameter is 1867.65 km. Its name means "golden-yellow land." It is in the Lunae Palus quadrangle, the Coprates quadrangle, the Margaritifer Sinus quadrangle, and the Oxia Palus quadrangle.

Ravi Vallis, Aromatum Chaos, Ophir, Ganges Chasma, Nanedi Valles, Shalbatana Vallis, Orson Welles Crater, Mutch Crater, and Da Vinci Crater are examples of major features in Xanthe Terra.

Over twenty years of observations from Mars Express have solidified our picture of Mars as a once-habitable planet with warmer and wetter epochs that may have been oases for ancient life. 

Processing notes:

This video was created using the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera Mars Chart (HMC30) data, an image mosaic made from single orbit observations of the mission’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The mosaic image, centred at 5°N/320°E, is combined with topography information from the digital terrain model to generate a three-dimensional landscape.

For every second of the movie, 50 separate frames are rendered following a predefined camera path in the scene. The vertical exaggeration used for the animation is three-fold. Atmospheric effects, like clouds and haze, have been added to conceal the limits of the terrain model. The haze starts building up at a distance of 250 km.

The HRSC camera on Mars Express is operated by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The systematic processing of the camera data took place at the DLR Institute for Planetary Research in Berlin-Adlershof. The working group of Planetary Science and Remote Sensing at Freie Universität Berlin used the data to create the film.

Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin & NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Duration: 3 minutes, 23 seconds
Release Date: Oct. 2, 2025

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