The channels and aprons only occur on the south-facing slope of this valley created by faults on each side of the trough.
Sunlight illuminates the area from the upper left.
To create the color versions seen here, we have taken much lower resolution red and blue images acquired by the MOC's wide angle cameras, and by the Viking Orbiter cameras in the 1970s, synthesized a green image by averaging red and blue, and created a pallete of colors that represent the range of colors on Mars. We then use a relationship that correlates color and brightness to assign a color to each gray level. This is only a crude approximation of martian color and should only be considered representative of Mars. It is likely Mars would not look like this to a human observer at Mars. Malin Space Science Systems and the California Institute of Technology built the MOC using spare hardware from the Mars Observer mission.