A southern highland whose surface has endured nearly four billion years.
Aonia Terra is a rugged southern highland with a surface roughly 3.8 billion years old, making it one of the more ancient landscapes on Mars. It is dissected by drainage networks that record running water early in the planet's history.
Claim your plot here →Aonia Terra belongs to Mars' Noachian era, the oldest and most heavily bombarded chapter of the planet's history. Its surface, dated to around 3.8 billion years, is saturated with impact craters of every size — a landscape that has changed little since the solar system's violent youth.
Winding through the craters are ancient drainage networks, the fossil channels of streams that once flowed when Mars was warmer and wetter. Because so little has resurfaced it, Aonia is like a deep-time snapshot: study it and you are reading the earliest pages of Martian geology, back when water still shaped the highlands.