Want to visit Mars this weekend? You’re in luck, as a team at Caltech has published a 5.7 terapixel mosaic of Mars that can be explored in 3D, just like Google Earth.
With a resolution of five meters per pixel, the new Mars global CTX mosaic Caltech has twenty times the image quality of previous global Mars maps He said. It covers about 99.5% of the Martian surface, between 88°N and 88°S, and the remaining half is missing because the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) did not take pictures of the area or the pictures were not of sufficient quality to include them.
The 110,000 images that were used to create the map were captured per file context camera aboard MRO, which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2006. Most of the mosaics were assembled using a feature-matching algorithm that uses nondestructive processing to stitch images together without causing blurring or smoothing between image boundaries.
The algorithm wasn’t able to do everything itself, though Dixon and his team spent three years manually collecting 13,000 images because the clouds and dust storms in the images meant the algorithm couldn’t combine them properly without human help.
“The scale of this is truly unprecedented,” said Jay Dixon, director of the Bruce Murray Planetary Visualization Laboratory at Caltech. Dixon was the architect of the new map and started the project in 2016 when Caltech hired him to set up the lab he now runs.
And it has an unprecedented scale: If printed at 300 dpi, Caltech said, the entire 5.7 trillion-pixel image would be large enough to be used as a canopy at California’s Rose Bowl and also as part of a parking lot. Unfortunately, Rose Bowl venues are not included in our criteria converter.
Which Martian horizon would you like to visit today?
The 3D map has been resized to “collision resolution,” which means it’s detailed enough to highlight small rock formations that might be of interest to scientists, but also intended for the average internet user to view Mars landmarks.
“School-age kids can use this now. My mom, who just turned 78, can use this now. The goal is to lower the barriers for people interested in exploring Mars,” Dixon said.
Many interesting geographic features on Mars are marked with shortcuts at the bottom of the map, allowing users to quickly visit Olympus Mons, the dust-containing Medusae Fossae, or a possible future Terra Sirenum landing site, among others.
For those who enjoy watching NASA’s fleet of Mars rovers, Perseverance, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity are all highlighted, with their daily paths tracked on a map so you can see how far apart they are and how small they are. They have explored so far from the surface of Mars.
However, armchair explorers of Mars will have to make a caveat: All images are in black and white, so the reddish part of the Red Planet should be filled with your imagination.
Dixon admits the map is an impressive feat, but he credits the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and its Context Camera for doing the real work.
“I’ve been working on this for six years, but the MRO team has spent the last two decades making this possible. The spacecraft continues to do great science,” Dixon said. ®
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