Thursday, March 19, 2009

mars holes

Here's something tangentially linked to my previous post: when Laurie aka Silk Spectre travels to Mars with Dr. Manhattan to try to convince him to end his self-imposed exile there and return to Earth to prevent nuclear Armageddon, the pair go on a brief tour of the Martian landscape in the bizarre craft Dr. M has magicked into existence. As always Alan Moore's research is spot on, so their tour includes two of the planet's most distinctive features: Olympus Mons (the largest known mountain in the Solar System at over 88,000 feet above the planet's surface) and the Valles Marineris (the largest known canyon, with the obvious exception of yo mamma), before finishing up at the Galle Crater which mimics (if you squint a bit) the book's trademark smiley-face motif.

Anyway, Google Mars now provides the facility for looking at all this stuff in more detail. Here's Olympus Mons, Valles Marineris and the Galle Crater.

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