The crater in the photo is a 0.5 kilometer wide basin inside the much larger Airy crater, which is about 43.5 km. The newly released image was taken on September 8, 2021, using the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and shared by NASA in an Instagram post on April 11, 2022.
In 1884, astronomers initially chose the larger Airy crater to mark Mars’ prime meridian, the line of zero degrees longitude, the point where East meets West. On Earth, the prime meridian is marked by the Greenwich Royal Observatory in England, which shows the boundary between the Eastern and Western hemispheres.
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Airy Crater is named after British astronomer Sir George Biddell Airy, who built the telescope at Greenwich Royal Observatory that first spotted the massive crater. Astronomers chose Airy to mark Mars’ prime meridian because it was large enough to be seen by telescopes at the time.
“But when higher resolution photos become available, a smaller feature is needed,” a NASA representative wrote on Instagram. Scientists chose Airy-0 to replace Airy as the prime meridian marker because it was just the right size but didn’t require drastic changes to the existing map, according to the post.
According to NASA Airy crater is located in a region known as Sinus Meridiani, which translates to “Middle Bay.” The glowing ridges in the crater are known as transverse aeolian ridges (TARs).
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“TAR is a feature we commonly see in craters and other stresses on Mars,” Abigail Fraeman, a planetary scientist and deputy project scientist for NASA’s Curiosity rover, told Live Science.
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