While NASA’s Curiosity and InSight roam the Mars surface, another machine has been circling the red planet for exactly 15 years and taking pictures of its surface.

European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission has published this picture, as seasons greetings from Mars.

It is the Korolev Crater (named after the Russian rocket engineer Sergei Korolev). It is 2 kilometers deep and filled with water ice, 1.8 km deep.


Korolev crater in perspective. (image European Space Agency, CC-BY-SA licensed)

Like I could endlessly stare at maps of the world as a kid, I can marvel about these images for a long time.