Image:STS100-704-152RioGrandeRift0.jpg

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STS100-704-152RioGrandeRift0.jpg‎ (33KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)

The Rio Grande rift, seen from the Space Shuttle. The earth's limb dominates the bottom of the image, with cirrus clouds obscuring very little of New Mexico. North is the top of the image. The image distorts features differently; north-south features get more compressed when viewed toward the earth's limb (south); the east-west features are relatively less compressed. The course of the Rio Grande, flowing from north to south, starts from the top of the image, next to Valles Caldera National Preserve, flowing diagonally across the image, past the Sandia mountains. White Sands is the central feature of the image; The Carrizoso malpais lies to the north of White Sands, separated from the Rio Grand by a series of mountain ranges, successively, the Oscura mountains, the San Andreas mountains, the Organ mountains the Franklin mountains, and the Sierra Juarez. The Rio Grande starts flowing southeasterly between the Franklin mountains and the Sierra Juarez.

The continental divide is approximately the left side of the image. The Gila river flows to the Gulf of California, rather than to the Gulf of Mexico.

The vast plains called the 'Llano Estacado' , Spanish for 'staked plains' lie to the right of the image. When the Spanish entered these plains, they could only compare them to the sea, a sea of grass.

This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". (NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy).

Warnings:

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Materials from the Hubble Space Telescope may be copyrighted if they do not explicitly come from the STScI. [1]
All materials created by the SOHO probe are copyrighted and require permission for commercial non-educational use. [2]
Images featured on the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) web site may be copyrighted. [3]

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