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NASA Instagrams a scary-looking Martian Crater, find out why this crater is important

The image was captured on October 27th, 2021, by the HiRISE, on the Mars reconnaissance orbiter from an altitude of 268.3 km above the surface of the red planet.

TN Science Desk

Updated Apr 14, 2022, 16:23 IST

NASA Instagrams a scary-looking Martian Crater find out why this crater is important

The American space agency – NASA posted a picture of a weird-looking crater from the red planet on Instagram. The high-resolution picture of the Martian Crater has left the netizens in complete awe. “You’re looking at 0° longitude on Mars—the Greenwich Observatory equivalent on the Red Planet,” said NASA in the caption of the picture.

The image was captured on October 27^th, 2021, by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), on the Mars reconnaissance orbiter from an altitude of 268.3 km above the surface of the red planet.

“The Martian crater marks the spot ❌” read the caption, NASA elaborated further explaining the importance of the spot “The larger crater that sits within this crater, called the Airy Crater, originally defined zero longitudes for Mars, but as higher resolution photos became available, a smaller feature was needed. This crater, called Airy-0 (zero) was selected because it did not need to adjust existing maps.”

For the uninitiated, the crater is important because its location defines the position of the ‘Prime Meridian’ of the planet Mars. According to NASA, Prime Meridian is an imaginary line on Earth that passes north to south through the Greenwich Observatory in London, England.

The “Airy-0” crater is about half a kilometer wide and lies within the dark regions of Sinus Meridiani. It was named in honor of the British Astronomer Royal Sir George Biddell Airy (1801–1892), who in 1850 built the transit circle telescope at Greenwich. The location of that telescope was subsequently chosen to define the location of Earth's prime meridian.

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