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The old and new missions bring good news of the red planet. The Mars Express spacecraft is celebrating this month 15 years of uninterrupted operations in orbit on Mars. To celebrate, the European Space Agency (ESA) has released a beautiful picture of the crater Korolev, known for staying all the time with the bottom full of ice. Meanwhile, NASA's latest Mars spacecraft, InSight, has installed its first instrument on the ground Elysium Planitia.
From the image of Mars Express. It is close to the North Martian polar ice cap and has a special feature: it keeps the ice water more or less stable in its interior. Indeed, although in this region, the surface ice eventually sublimates in summer, the interior of the deep crater (2 km deep and 82 km wide) creates a "cold trap", capturing drafts cold and remaining at below-average temperatures in the region. Thus, the ice never sublimates.
The image is a mosaic of five different images captured along several orbits. ESA also generated, as usual with the Mars Express images, a perspective recreation from a 3D ground elevation model.
In the equatorial region, the InSight mission, which landed on Mars on the 26th, successfully installed its seismometer on the ground of Mars. NASA has released a photo taken the day before with the delicate ground instrument captured in the faint light of the Martian sun.
A protective hood has yet to be installed on the seismometer in order to
With all this news, we are certain that 2019 also announces it as a very interesting year for the fans of the planet. March.
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