NASA has released a interactive map of mars, which you can access in the previous link, compiled from more than 100,000 images taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter of the US space agency.
According to a report published on the website of gizmodo, the mosaic is the highest-resolution global portrait of Mars ever made.
The map is the creation of scientists at the Murray Laboratory for Planetary Visualization at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). With 5.7 trillion pixels, it offers a panoramic black and white look at Mars. It’s a huge amount of data, so it may take a while for your computer to load it.
The tool, hosted online by Caltech, offers shortcuts to some of the most popular sites on the Red Planet, including its largest mountain, Olympus Mons, and Jezero Crater, the dry lakebed where the rover mission is underway. Perseverance.
visitors too they can mark locations, measure distances, and toggle layers like moving paths, a topographic heat map, and impact craters.
Exploring Mars from your PC
Rich Zurek, project scientist for the mission, explained a JPL statement: “For 17 years, MRO has been revealing Mars to us as no one has seen it before. This mosaic is a wonderful new way to explore some of the images we’ve collected”.
The images come from the context camera of the MRO or CTX. The camera regularly watches the Martian surface as the orbiter circles the planet. Last year, researchers detected a large meteor impact on the surface of Mars, thanks to the black and white imager.
The mosaic image was stitched together algorithmically, and anything the computer couldn’t contextualize was added manually.