News from Mars: Mile-deep ice crater and marsquakes

Although it looks like a beautiful mound of snow on the Red Planet, the Korolev crater would be more suited for ice skating than building a snowman.

The European Space Agency released an image taken by its Mars Express mission on Thursday, showing the crater filled with water ice, the CNN reports.

The crater isn't just icy because of the Martian winter. Korolev crater is filled with ice that's about 5,905 feet thick all year long.

The crater, which is nearly 50.1 miles across, is just south of the northern polar cap, known as Olympia Undae, in the northern lowlands. The deep base of the crater floor, about 1.2 miles below the rim, contains ice and acts as a cold trap. Air moving over the ice cools and sinks, creating a layer of cold air over the ice. This has enabled the ice to remain without melting.

The crater was named for Sergei Korolev, a chief rocket engineer and spacecraft designer known as the father of Soviet space technology. Korolev worked on the Sputnik program, the Vostok program that carried the first human into space in 1961 and rockets that were precursors to the Soyuz launcher.

The image itself is a composite of pictures of the crater taken by the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera. The European Space Agency's Mars Express mission is celebrating 15 years after it launched in June 2003 and entered Martian orbit on December 25, 2003.