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If placed on Earth, Valles Marineris would span the width of North America. [36] In places, the canyons are up to 300 km wide and 10 km deep. Often compared to Earth's Grand Canyon, the Valles Marineris has a very different origin than its tinier, so-called counterpart on Earth. The Grand Canyon is largely a product of water erosion.
Mars has two relatively small (compared to Earth's) natural moons, Phobos (about 22 kilometres (14 mi) in diameter) and Deimos (about 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) in diameter), which orbit close to the planet. The origin of both moons is unclear, although a popular theory states that they were asteroids captured into Martian orbit.
This list contains a selection of objects 50 and 99 km in radius (100 km to 199 km in average diameter). The listed objects currently include most objects in the asteroid belt and moons of the giant planets in this size range, but many newly discovered objects in the outer Solar System are missing, such as those included in the following ...
The most abundant silicate minerals on the Earth's surface include quartz, the feldspars, amphibole, mica, pyroxene, and olivine. [25] Common carbonate minerals include calcite (found in limestone), aragonite, and dolomite. [26] Elevation histogram of the surface of the Earth—approximately 71% of the Earth's surface is covered with water.
Mars has an old surface compared to Earth. While much of Earth's land surface is just a few hundred million years old, large areas of Mars are billions of years old. Some surface areas have been formed, eroded away, then covered over with new layers of rocks. The Mariner 9 spacecraft in the 1970s photographed a feature that was called "White Rock".
The Curiosity rover has been poking around the Gale crater on Mars for a few years now, and it turns out the place may be more similar to Earth than we originally thought. Using rock data gathered ...
Like the Earth, the crustal properties and structure of the surface of Mars are thought to have evolved through time; in other words, as on Earth, tectonic processes have shaped the planet. However, both the ways this change has happened and the properties of the planet's lithosphere are very different when compared to the Earth.
The Noachian period occurred from 4.1 to 3.7 billion years ago, and little is known from direct measurements dating to the pre-Noachian period on Mars, between 4.5 billion and 4.1 billion years ...