A crater named for the man who drew Mars' imaginary canals.
Schiaparelli is an ancient impact crater roughly 460 km across, sitting near the Martian equator in Terra Sabaea. It honors Giovanni Schiaparelli, the 19th-century astronomer whose maps of Martian "canali" sparked a century of alien-canal speculation.
Claim your plot here →Schiaparelli is one of Mars' large old impact basins, its worn rim enclosing a floor 460 km wide — big enough to swallow entire countries. Its interior holds layered sedimentary deposits that hint at cycles of dust, water and wind acting over billions of years.
The name carries history. In 1877 Giovanni Schiaparelli mapped fine lines on Mars he called "canali" — Italian for channels — which was mistranslated as "canals" and fueled decades of belief in a Martian civilization. The crater is a monument to that pivotal, if mistaken, chapter of astronomy.
Schiaparelli's 460 km width is comparable to the ~600 km spread of Olympus Mons — a hole nearly as wide as the solar system's tallest volcano.
At 460 km across, the crater floor is wider than the whole of England.