STUNNING images of a huge crater on Mars have “opened the book” on our understanding of the Red Planet, from its rocky beginnings and history with water to the question of whether it has ever sustained life.

Nasa scientists yesterday triumphantly unveiled a detailed image of the crater, taken three days ago by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and a robotic rover on the planet’s surface.

The orbiter arrived in Mars’s orbit only this week, more than a year after its launch, and turned its cameras on to capture the close-ups. It is there to provide back-up for the rover, called Opportunity, which is exploring layers of rock in cliffs surrounding the crater to gain insights into the planet’s formation.

The way the rocks are formed around the crater, named Victoria, has allowed the high-resolution camera on the orbiter to photograph the subsurface of the planet, providing many clues to its formation.

“It gives us a window on the past on the planet,” Doug McCuistion, director of Nasa’s Mars Exploration Programme in Washington, said at a news conference yesterday.

Victoria, named after the only ship to complete the Portuguese explorer Magellan’s global voyage, is the biggest crater that Nasa expects to explore during this Mars mission.

So far, it has exceeded even their most hopeful expectations. At several hundred meters, five times deeper than any crater explored before, Victoria’s exposed geological layers record a far longer span of Mars’s environmental history than has been seen before.

“We’re extremely excited to see these layers and rocks,” said Jim Bell, lead scientist for the rover’s panoramic camera. Mr Bell added that he was “running out of superlatives” to describe the stunning images of Mars. “We have just sort of opened the book,” he said.

Much of the ancient rock that makes up Victoria’s walls showed pervasive evidence of having once been soaked in water, a key mystery that the rover mission is trying to solve.

The main purpose of the mission is to search for any evidence that water may have existed on the surface of Mars for a prolonged period of time.

While other Mars missions have shown that water flowed across the surface in the planet’s history, it is not known whether water was ever there long enough to provide a habitat for life, as it did on Earth.

Within two months of landing on Mars in early 2004, Opportunity found geological evidence for the existence of a wet environment in the distant past. Scientists hope the layers in Victoria will provide new clues about whether that wet environment was persistent, fleeting or cyclical and, ultimately, whether there ever has been life on Mars.

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