A Postcard from Mars

Like tourists everywhere, the two Viking landers and their orbiters have spent much of the 15 months since their arrival on Mars snapping pictures of the Red Planet. The latest batch includes the best and most revealing shots yet. Among the pictures released by NASA: a photomosaic of the planet's north pole, showing a concentric pattern of striations in the ice cap; a color snapshot showing newly formed frost on the ground near the feet of the dust-covered Viking 2 lander; and a photo proving that something--wind, a tremor, a frost heave--has caused a portion of the Martian surface to slump since it was photographed last October. The most spectacular shot in the current album is a "down the hole" look into the summit caldera, or crater, of Mars' Olympus Mons, a volcano that dwarfs the earth's mightiest peak, Mount Everest. Olympus Mons measures 600 kilometers (375 miles)--the width of the state of New Mexico--across its base and towers to 27.4 kilometers (90,000 ft.)--three times the height of Everest.

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