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Toasty core

Radioactive materiał inside Mars madę it so hot when it was young that it melted completeły. The planet's heavy iron sank to the middle, and its lighter rocks floated on top. Over time, its surface cooled, but molten rock would break through the crust and flow across the planet. The giant volcanoes on Mars today grew through successive eruptions in one spot.

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Cratered world

There are tens of thousands of craters on Mars where asteroids crashed into the planet in the distant past. They rangę from simple bowl-shaped ones, around half a mile across, to huge basins hundreds of miles wide.

	width
Hellas Planitia	1,367 miles (2,200 km)
Argyre Planitia	497 miles (800 km)
Lowell Crater	126 miles (203 km)
Columbus Crater	74 miles (119 km)
Thom Crater	15 miles (24 km)
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Water world

• Around 3-4 billion years ago, Mars was warmer and had liquid water. This flowed across the surface, carving out valleys and forming lakes and seas.

• There is still water on Mars today, but it is frozen. Its south polar cap (above) consists of predominantly water ice roughly centered on Mars’s South Pole.

• Water exists under Mars’s surface as permafrost—water ice mixed into the soil and frozen to the hardness of solid rock.

• There is also water in Mars’s atmosphere. It sometimes forms clouds of water ice, and it can also settle on the ground as early morning frost.

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