Where is Valles Marineris on Mars?
Valles Marineris runs east to west just south of the Martian equator, with the Tharsis volcanoes immediately to its west. This destination is centred at 14.01° south, 58.59° west, in Coprates Chasma, a trough about 960 kilometres long near the middle of the system. At about 4,000 kilometres long, the system is far longer than any one model can show, so a model holds a section of it; the deepest point of the whole system lies about 130 kilometres east of this centre point.
How big and how deep is Valles Marineris?
The USGS puts the system at about 4,000 kilometres long, enough to cross the United States. Its individual troughs are mostly 50 to 100 kilometres wide, and in the centre they merge into a depression up to 600 kilometres across. The deepest part lies in Coprates Chasma, more than 7 kilometres below the nearest rim and 11 kilometres below the surrounding plateau, according to the HiRISE camera team. In places, the USGS notes, the floor is six to seven times deeper than the Grand Canyon.
How did Valles Marineris form?
It opened along faults. As magma pushed up beneath Tharsis, the whole region rose and the crust around it stretched and broke; geologists think the canyon began opening this way about 3.5 billion years ago. The USGS describes what followed: the surface collapsed into deep depressions that filled with layered material, perhaps lake deposits; later faults cut across the older troughs, widening and joining them; and huge landslides fell into the new gaps. Mariner 9 first saw it in 1972; it is named after that mission's science team.
What does Valles Marineris look like as a 3D print?
It wants some exaggeration. On a model 200 millimetres across that takes in 1,000 kilometres of the canyon, the 11 kilometres from plateau to deepest floor come out at about 2 millimetres, and Coprates Chasma becomes a groove 12 to 20 millimetres wide. That is visible at 1x, but it reads as a shallow channel rather than a canyon. Between 2x and 4x, the deepest point sits roughly 4 to 9 millimetres below the plateau, which is where it starts to look like one.
The elevation data is plenty for the canyon's structure. The trough and its walls come through, and so does Coprates Catena, a chain of collapse pits running parallel to it on the south side, up to 22 kilometres wide and 5 kilometres deep, or about 4 millimetres across on the model. What it cannot hold is the detail HiRISE photographs at 25 centimetres per pixel, such as the layered sediments exposed in the wall of an 8-kilometre crater at the deepest point.
What is OrbitStudio?
OrbitStudio turns real NASA elevation data into 3D-printable models. You pick a region of Mars on a globe or a flat map, choose a jigsaw puzzle or a solid ornament, and get ready-to-print files with terrain and borders already separated and coloured. No CAD, no mesh repair. The heights come from the laser altimeter on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, MOLA, at up to 463 metres per pixel.
Trying it is free and needs no account: pick a region, generate it and turn it around in 3D. Downloading the model — STL files and pre-coloured 3MF files for Bambu Studio or OrcaSlicer — uses one credit from a pass. The generator covers the Moon too.
Other landmarks
The night sky, too
StellarMesh, from the same maker, turns the sky over any place, on any date from 1900 to 2100, into a 3D-printable star map. Its STL is free.