“The crater of Mars marks the place,” NASA officials wrote in the caption below the image.
And they continued, “You’re looking at 0 degrees longitude on Mars, the equivalent of the Greenwich Observatory on the Red Planet.”
The Greenwich Observatory is located on Earth on top of a steep hill in London indicating where the main meridian of our planet passes, an imaginary line that divides the globe between north and south and determines where east meets west.
Moreover, it is used as a “zero reference line for astronomical observations,” according to NASA.
In the image of Mars, there is a large crater within a second rocky basin, called the “Irie crater”.
Airy crater originally set the zero longitude of Mars, but when scientists began taking more detailed images of the planet’s surface, they needed a more accurate marker.
Hence, NASA identified the smaller crater, which he named (Airy-0), as the main meridian, to not change existing maps.
The image was taken by the US space agency using the high-resolution imaging science experiment on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Since its release, the photo has gained nearly 400,000 likes.
