[영상] 영화 ‘마션’ 실제 배경…지름이 서울~부산 거리인 화성 충돌구

The European Space Agency (ESA) has released a video capturing the Scar inside the enormous Hellas Crater on Mars, the filming location for the movie 'The Martian'. This is the largest impact crater on Mars, discovered in the 2011 novel 'The Martian' by Andy Weir and later portrayed in the 2015 film. In the film, astronaut Mark Watney becomes stranded on Mars after a massive dust storm prevents his rescue ship from reaching him.

Watney is stranded in the vast desert of Acidalia Planitia and must travel 3,200km to reach the Scar where NASA's Mars 2020 mission is currently preparing to land. The Scar itself is 460km wide, much larger than the distance between Seoul and Busan. However, it is relatively shallow. The European Space Agency states that the shape of the Scar is likely due to centuries of wind-blown sediments, water, lava, or a combination of the three wearing it down.

The Scar contains several layers, including a slightly elevated, long-winding ridge known as a wrinkle ridge, formed after lava layers slowly cooled and contracted, causing the surface to buckle and rise. Additionally, dark streaks running across the top of the Scar may be fossilized volcanic ash from a past Martian volcanic eruption.

The crater was named after Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who observed dark lines on Mars in 1877 and named them 'canali', which was later mistranslated to 'canals', leading people to believe there might be intelligent life on Mars. The ESA's Mars Express has been orbiting the planet since 2003, capturing the red planet from different angles and creating a vast 3D map of Mars.