Many impact craters can also be seen here. Some are buried, some worn away, and some surrounded by blankets of material thrown out during the initial crater-forming collision. Overall, the terrain is relatively smooth, indicating that it has been flooded by lava; in places this lava crumpled and folded as it cooled and shrunk, forming irregular ‘wrinkle ridges’. Isolated hills (‘mesas’) can also be seen (to the upper right, for example) – remnants of a once-higher surface that has been worn away over time.

This image comes courtesy of the HRSC camera, one of eight state-of-the-art instruments aboard Mars Express. Mars Express has been capturing and exploring Mars’s many landscapes since it launched in 2003. The orbiter has mapped the planet’s surface at unprecedented resolution, in colour, and in three dimensions for over two decades now, returning insights that have fundamentally changed our understanding of our planetary neighbour (read more about Mars Express and its findings here).