NASA has released an interactive map of Mars, consisting of over 100,000 images taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This map stands out as the highest resolution spherical portrait of Mars ever created.
The map came about as a result of the work of scientists at the Murray Planetary Visualization Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. Consisting of 5.7 trillion pixels, this map offers a comprehensive black-and-white view of Mars. You may even find that your computer has some difficulty loading the map, as there is an enormous amount of data here.
The tool, available online by Caltech, offers shortcuts to some of the most popular locations, including Olympus Mons, the Red Planet’s largest mountain, and the dried-up lake bed Jezero Crater, where the Perseverance rover mission continues. In addition, visitors can mark points they want, measure distances, and change layers such as rover paths, a topographical heatmap, and impact craters.
In a JPL publication, the mission’s project scientist Rich Zurek said, “The MRO has been showing us Mars in a way that no one has seen before for 17 years,” he continued. “This mosaic is a great new way to explore some of the images we’ve collected.”
Images come from the MRO’s context camera or CTX. The camera regularly observes the Martian surface as the orbiter spins rapidly around the planet. Thanks to the black and white imager, researchers detected a large meteorite impact on the planet’s surface last year. The map mosaic was algorithmically linked by the computer, and the points that the computer could not connect were then added manually.
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