An amazing 5.7 terapixel panoramic image of Mars was created by Caltech using data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and is available for everyone to take a look, from scientists to kids in school. It shows the planet’s craters, cliffs and tracks made by tiny dust devils with unbelievable precision.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has taken a stunning and detailed mosaic of the Red Planet’s surface with 110,000 images. The pictures were taken by the spacecraft’s black-and-white Context Camera, or CTX, and each image covers an area of nearly 270 square feet (25 square meters). You can see cliffsides, crater marks and even dust devil tracks in these amazing photos!
The Global CTX Mosaic of Mars has the highest resolution ever. That means it is made up of 5.7 trillion tiny pixels! If you printed it out, it would be so big that it could cover an entire stadium like the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, California.
The Bruce Murray Laboratory from Caltech spent six years and a lot of hours to make the ‘mosaic’. It’s so exact that over 120 scientists have cited it since its creation. At the same time, anyone can use it without difficulty!
“My goal,” said Jay Dickson, the scientist in charge of the Murray Lab, “is to make it easier for people who are interested in learning about Mars. I want it to be accessible for everybody – even my 78-year-old mom can use it and school kids too!”
CTX is one of three cameras attached to MRO, a jet space vehicle owned and managed by NASA. The HiRISE camera is powerful enough to take photos of objects as small as a table. CTX takes pictures of the larger areas around these items so scientists can understand how they fit together. It’s also great at spotting craters on the surface of Mars. Lastly, the MARCI camera takes pictures of weather all over Mars – but those pictures aren’t very detailed.
“Journey to the Red Planet
Since the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) was sent to Mars in 2006, the camera Technical Experiment (CTX)has taken almost all the pictures of the Red Planet. To make a map of this planet, scientists need to first search through many images and look for ones that show clear skies and consistent lightning. It is like finding a needle in a haystack while also putting together a puzzle at the same time!
To create his mosaic, scientist Dickson developed a special algorithm used to find similarities between different images. He then put together the remaining 13,000 images that the algorithm didn’t understand. There are still some blank spaces which show us parts of Mars that hadn’t been seen yet by CTX or were hidden under dust and clouds.
Laura Kerber is a scientist who works at JPL. She was involved in creating a new mosaic, which turned out to be both visually stunning and useful for science. When she saw the finished product, Laura said that it was something she had wanted to have for quite a while.
Recently, Kerber virtually visited her favorite place on Mars, called Medusae Fossae. It is a really big area, about the same size as Mongolia. Scientists still don’t know how it was formed and one of their proposed theories is that the area may be an ash pile from a nearby volcano! When she clicked on the CTX mosaic button, Kerber was able to zoom in and observe old river channels, which are now dried up due to lack of water.
On the planet Mars, you can travel to special places like Gale Crater and Jezero Crater where Curiosity and Perseverance rovers from NASA are exploring. Or maybe check out Olympus Mons – the highest volcano in our solar system. Also, you can explore all the impact craters on the entire surface of the planet which will help you understand just how many bumps it has!
For the past 17 years, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been showing us a whole new view of Mars. According to JPL’s project scientist Rich Zurek, this collection of imagery creates an awesome way for people to explore Marts.
NASA funded a special project called the Planetary Data Archiving, Restoration and Tools (PDART) program. This program helps to utilize existing NASA data from extended missions such as MRO which allow everyone to gain access to all the information.
NASA’s Out-Of-This-World Project
NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington asked JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) to manage their MRO project. Caltech, which is a school, is managing the JPL for NASA. The University of Arizona in Tucson runs HiRISE and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp in Boulder, Colorado made it. Malin Space Science Systems, based in San Diego, built and look after Context Camera.
