Released August 18, 2004

The THEMIS Image of the Day will be exploring the nomenclature of Mars for the next three weeks.

Hydraotes Chaos

• Chaos: distinctive area of broken terrain
• Hydraotes: Alexander the Great attacked the Mallains on the banks of the Hydraotes River (today's Ravi River) during his conquest of India.

Hydraotes Chaos is typical of chaos regions on Mars. Note the break up of the plateau into smaller mesas separated by deep valleys. In some chaos, the mesas also seem to get fractured into smaller and smaller segments.

Nomenclature Fact of the Day: A person must be deceased for at least three years before his/her name can be used for a planetary feature.

Image information: VIS instrument. Latitude 0.4, Longitude 324.8 East (35.2 West). 19 meter/pixel resolution.

Note: this THEMIS visual image has not been radiometrically nor geometrically calibrated for this preliminary release. An empirical correction has been performed to remove instrumental effects. A linear shift has been applied in the cross-track and down-track direction to approximate spacecraft and planetary motion. Fully calibrated and geometrically projected images will be released through the Planetary Data System in accordance with Project policies at a later time.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) was developed by Arizona State University, Tempe, in collaboration with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote Sensing. The THEMIS investigation is led by Dr. Philip Christensen at Arizona State University. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the prime contractor for the Odyssey project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.