US Lands on Moon, but Here’s the Solar System’s Tallest Cliff

The US has made its first lunar landing in more than half a century with a spacecraft built and operated by a Texas-based private company. The uncrewed robot lander named Odysseus touched down near the lunar south pole yesterday – read more about it here.

While the cliff with the greatest vertical drop on Earth is Mount Thor on Baffin Island at over 1,200 metres, very little information is available about rocky outcrops on the moon. However, many tall cliffs in the solar system have been roughly measured.

The tallest known cliff in the solar system is called Verona Rupes on Miranda, a small moon that orbits Uranus. In 1986 the Voyager 2 measured it to be around 20 kilometers tall, around 17 times as tall as Mount Thor. The daytime temps on Miranda dip to -170˚C and the gravity is 0.008 times what Earth’s is, meaning it would take 12 minutes to fall from the top to the bottom moving at 200 km/h.

The solar system’s tallest volcano is Olympus Mons at 21.9 km high, it’s found on Mars. Also on Mars is a canyon called Valles Marineris, which is 4,000 km long, 200 km wide, and 10 km deep. The Grand Canyon on Earth is  445 km long, 30 km wide, and 1.6 km deep.