14 DAY TRIAL // It will probably be a while before we, humans, get around to setting up colonies on the Red Planet - supposing this will ever come to happen - and so, until then, we'll just have to settle for gazing upon Martian landscapes from behind our computer screens.
The latest Martian terrain to come into view: the Atlantis Chaos in the planet's southern hemisphere, whose many impact craters and rugged cliffs are revealed in a video released by scientists with the European Space Agency just yesterday.
The footage, available below, is a simulated flight over the Atlantis Chaos put together using data delivered by the European Space Agency's Mars Express, launched in June of 2003.
Apart from cliffs and quite massive craters, there are smooth plaints, ridges and fracture lines. These geological features indicate that, although seemingly dormant now, Mars was once all too familiar with tectonic activity that shaped its surface.
Interestingly, astronomers suspect that Mars' Atlantis Chaos once held vast amounts of water that, although now gone, was what created the channels carved into this terrain.
If the Red Planet really did accommodate for liquid water at some point in its history, this means it might be that lifeforms, be it only primitive ones, emerged on its surface as well.
