You can now explore the lands of Mars from your home with the help of a Caltech team. They have created a 5.7 Terapixel Mars mosaic that you can use to explore 3D. The new global CTX mosaic has a resolution of 5 meters per pixel. Its image quality is 20x higher than previous global Mars maps, according to the makers.
The mosaic allows users to explore approximately 99.5% the Martian surface, which spans from 88degs south to 88degs north.
The orbiter may not have captured the images of the rest of the area, so the remaining half percent is missing. The mosaic was also likely to lack sufficient quality images. The mosaic was created from 1,10,000 images. The snaps were taken by the Mars reconnaissance orbiter (MRO), which used its own boarded context camera. Since 2006, the MRO has orbited Mars.
The Hand-Stitched Snaps
The snaps were stitched using an exclusive feature-matching algorithm. This algorithm uses nondestructive processing to merge the images, which prevents blurring and smoothing of the borders. The algorithm alone was not enough to do the job.
This project took me six years to complete, but the MRO team spent the last two decades making it possible. The spacecraft continues to do great science.Jay Dickson
Caltech’s team spent three years manually joining 13,000 images. The algorithm could not match the images properly because of clouds and dust storms.
It is said that the three-dimensional mosaic can scale easily to outcrop resolution.
Jay Dickson was the team’s leader. He is currently Caltech’s Bruce Murray Laboratory of planetary visualization’s lab manager. Dickson was the one who created the new map and initiated it when Caltech gave him the responsibility for establishing the lab.
Caltech claims that the Martian mosaic has an unprecedented scale. The entire image, which is 5.7 trillion pixels in size, could be printed at 300 DPI. This would allow it to cover the Rose Bowl Stadium in California and its parking lot.
It also contains the details necessary to identify tiny rock formations that might be of interest to scientists. This feature will also allow users to view the Martian contours.
Who Can Refer to The Map?
Caltech claims that the map can be used by everyone, from school children to octogenarians. Caltech claims that the mosaic was published by the lab to remove any barriers for those who are keen to explore the Martian land. These tags include shortcuts at the bottom of each map that allow users to navigate to different Martian landscapes such as Terra Sirenum and Olympus mons.
Different tags highlight the unique geographical features of the red world on the map.
The mosaic isn’t demoralizing for those who want to see NASA’s Mars rover fleet. It highlights iconic rovers such as Opportunity, Spirit, Perseverance and Spirit.
The map clearly shows their route so that users can see how far apart they are and how much of the Martian surface has been discovered.
The only problem is that the images were published in black and not white. Users will see the’red parts’ of the red planet as black.
