In March 1999, Piccard was on the final leg of an around-the-world journey by hot air balloon the first-ever nonstop flight of its kind when his Breitling Orbiter3 swept low over the Egyptian desert and skidded to a halt on the corrugated plains.
Using a ground-piercing radar sensor aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a team of scientists created 3-D maps of an equatorial region known as Elysium Planitia and the channels that run underneath the plains.