Discover Mars in a mosaic provided by NASA with a resolution of 5.7 trillion pixels

07:26 a.m

Slopes, impact craters, and swirling dust trails are captured in exquisite detail in new mosaics from red planet Comprised of 110,000 images taken by the spacecraft’s veteran black-and-white camera, or CTX, the images cover approximately 25 square meters of surface area per pixel.

This makes Global CTX Mosaic to Mars The highest resolution global image of a planet ever created. If printed, it would be a tessellation of 5.7 trillion pixels (or 5.7 terapixels) large enough to cover Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, California.

How long did it take to do?

project Caltech Bruce Murray Planetary Visualization Laboratory, The mosaic took six years and tens of thousands of hours to develop. It is so detailed that more than 120 peer-reviewed scientific articles have already cited a trial version. But the tiles are also easy enough for anyone to use.

“I wanted something accessible to everyone,” Jay Dixon, an imaging scientist who led the project and runs Murray’s lab, said in a statement. “Schoolchildren can use this now. My mom who turned 78 can wear this now. The goal is to lower the barriers for people interested in exploring Mars.”

CTX It is one of three cameras on board MROwhich is directed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. One such camera, the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), provides color images of small surface features such as a dining table. Instead, CTX provides a broader view of the terrain surrounding these features, helping scientists understand how they are connected. Its ability to capture larger areas of the landscape has made CTX particularly useful for detecting impact craters at the surface. A third camera, the Mars Color Imager (MARCI), operated by the same team that powers CTX, produces a daily global map of Martian weather at much lower spatial resolution.

Taking pictures since MRO’s arrival at Mars in 2006, CTX has documented nearly the entire Red Planet, making its images an ideal starting point for scientists when creating the map. A bit like looking for a needle in a haystack and putting together a puzzle at the same time, mapping requires downloading and browsing through a large set of images to find those that have the same lighting conditions and clear skies.

How did they do it?

To create the new mosaic, Dixon developed an algorithm to match the images based on the captured features. I manually collected the remaining 13,000 images that the algorithm could not match. The remaining areas in the mosaic represent parts of Mars that were not imaged by CTX when Dixon began work on this project, or areas obscured by clouds or dust.

Laura Kerber, a Mars scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, provided comments on the new mosaic as it took shape. “I’ve wanted something like this for a long time,” Kerber said. “It’s a beautiful art product that’s also useful for science.”

Kerber recently used the image to visit his favorite place on Mars: Medusae FossaeIt is a dusty region the size of Mongolia. Scientists aren’t sure exactly how it formed; Kerber suggested it could be an ash pile from a nearby volcano. With the click of a button on a CTX mosaic, you can see the former and now dry river channels meandering across the landscape.

Users can also jump into areas such as pits Galley And Jezeroareas explored by the rovers curiousity And perseverance From NASA, or visit Olympus Mons, the highest volcano in the solar system, adds topographic data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor mission. One notable feature of the mosaic highlights impact craters across the planet, allowing viewers to see just how warped the surface of Mars is.