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| - The photo genuinely showed an ice-capped crater on Mars.
Scientists did not make the discovery in late 2024. Rather, the photo was taken years earlier, in 2018.
In late December 2024 and early January 2025, a photo circulated on
One Facebook post, for instance, amassed more than 27,000 likes as of this writing with the caption:
Water Ice Has Officially Been Found On Mars:
This image, captured by ESA's Mars Express, showcases the Korolev crater, an 82-kilometer-wide structure located in the northern lowlands of Mars.
Korolev crater on Mars resembles a vast field of snow but is actually filled with ice.
The claim appeared elsewhere on Facebook, as well as on X and Reddit.
The photo is indeed real, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). The ESA's Mars Express mission, which launched in 2003, captured the image using a high-resolution camera.
However, despite the posts' implication that the discovery was recent as of December 2024, the photo was actually taken in 2018. According to the ESA:
This image from ESA's Mars Express shows Korolev crater, an 82-kilometre-across feature found in the northern lowlands of Mars.
This oblique perspective view was generated using a digital terrain model and Mars Express data gathered over orbits 18042 (captured on 4 April 2018), 5726, 5692, 5654, and 1412. The crater itself is centred at 165° E, 73° N on the martian surface. The image has aresolution of roughly 21 metres per pixel.
This image was created using data from the nadir and colour channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The nadir channel is aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, as if looking straight down at the surface.
Multiple reputable news outlets published the photo shortly after its release in 2018, such as NPR, The Guardian and BBC.
As the ESA explained in a 2018 article, the Korolev crater (named after Soviet rocket engineer Sergei Korolev) is filled with ice rather than snow. "The very deepest parts of Korolev crater, those containing ice, act as a natural cold trap: the air moving over the deposit of ice cools down and sinks, creating a layer of cold air that sits directly above the ice itself," the article read.
The ESA credited the photo to the German Aerospace Center and Free University of Berlin, agencies that have partnered with the ESA for the Mars Express mission.
Also in 2018, t
(ESA/DLR/FU BERLIN)
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