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Olympus Mons, a shield volcano on Mars, is the tallest mountain in the Solar System. NASA’s Mars Odyssey Photojournal lists its height as 21.9 km (13.6 miles, or 72,000 feet). Published figures differ because sources describe height using different reference points, so those numbers are not all directly interchangeable.
How tall is Olympus Mons?
NASA’s Mars Odyssey Photojournal gives Olympus Mons a height of 21.9 km (13.6 miles, or 72,000 feet) in an entry added on August 11, 2023: NASA Science Photojournal: Olympus Mons (PIA26055). That is the clearest headline figure to use, with NASA and its stated measurement attached.
Other NASA pages give figures with different descriptions. A 2003 summit image says the depicted summit area is just over 20 km above Mars’s 0 km datum, while NASA educational resources describe Olympus Mons as about 25 km tall or more than 26 km above its base. The inspected sources do not establish one harmonized method behind all these figures, so they should not be treated as competing measurements from an identical baseline.
One number in the 2023 Photojournal entry is easy to misread: 7,757 m (25,449 feet) is the elevation change across the pictured Olympus Rupes escarpment, not the height of the whole mountain.
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Is Olympus Mons a volcano?
Yes. Olympus Mons is a shield volcano: a broad volcanic landform with a gentle slope rather than a steep, sharply peaked profile. NASA’s Goddard StarChild page describes its width as more than twenty times its height, and its classroom resource gives the summit caldera a width of 80 km. The broad shape can make the slope difficult to perceive from the summit, a point NASA Ames notes is compounded by Mars’s curvature.
Why is Olympus Mons so large?
NASA/JPL explains that Mars does not have Earth-like tectonic plates moving over volcanic hotspots. On Earth, plate motion can carry a volcano away from its magma source, producing a chain of volcanoes; on Mars, volcanic activity could keep building in one place. NASA/JPL also says Mars’s lower gravity could let magma be pushed to greater heights. Together, these factors help explain how a single volcano could grow to Olympus Mons’s scale. See NASA/JPL Education: Mars in a Minute — How Did Mars Get Such Enormous Mountains? (published September 18, 2024; updated September 25, 2024).
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How does Olympus Mons compare with Mount Everest?
NASA lists Mount Everest at 29,032 feet and Olympus Mons at 72,000 feet, making the latter more than twice as tall by those stated figures. The comparison needs a reference-point caveat: Everest’s figure is given relative to sea level, while NASA’s Mars sources describe Olympus Mons using a Martian datum or its base. The measurements are not automatically equivalent simply because both are called heights.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why do sources give different heights?
“Height” can refer to elevation above a defined datum or relief measured from a mountain’s base. NASA’s sources use more than one description: the Photojournal’s 21.9 km headline figure, a summit elevation just over 20 km above the Martian datum, and educational estimates of 25 km or more than 26 km above the base. Because the pages do not provide a single shared measurement method, the careful summary is that Olympus Mons is about 22 km tall according to NASA’s Mars Odyssey Photojournal, while other NASA descriptions report different values using stated reference points.
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NASA sources
- NASA Science Photojournal: Olympus Mons (PIA26055), added August 11, 2023.
- NASA Science Photojournal: Top of Olympus Mons, added August 20, 2003.
- NASA Goddard StarChild: Olympus Mons.
- NASA: How Big Is It? teacher resource.
- NASA Ames: Interesting Fact of the Month 2022.
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