Deimos in color from Viking Orbiter 2

Filed under pretty pictures, Deimos, NASA Mars missions before 1996, Mars, amateur image processing

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This image of Deimos is composed of four images taken by Viking Orbiter 2 on August 25, 1977 through red, green, violet, and clear filters.

NASA / JPL / color composite by Emily Lakdawalla

The Viking orbiters are the only spacecraft to have obtained views of anything but Deimos' Mars-facing hemisphere. This is a view up into the enormous crater that dominates the southern hemisphere of Deimos. It is hypothesized that the ejecta from this crater re-accreted onto Deimos, producing its oddly smooth surface. This basin, like all but two of the craters on Deimos' surface, is not named. The image is a red-green-violet composite overlaid on the better-quality clear-filter image and has been enlarged by a factor of two.

Copyright holder: Emily Lakdawalla

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder. Original image data dated on or about August 25, 1977