![]() At the click of a button on the CTX mosaic, she can zoom in and admire ancient river channels, now dry, winding through the landscape there. Scientists are unsure exactly how it formed Kerber has proposed it might be a pile of ash from a nearby volcano. Kerber recently used the image to visit her favorite spot on Mars: Medusae Fossae, a dusty region about the size of Mongolia. “It’s both a beautiful product of art and also useful for science.” “I’ve wanted something like this for a long time,” Kerber said. Laura Kerber, a Mars scientist at JPL, provided feedback on the new mosaic as it took shape. The remaining gaps in the mosaic represent parts of Mars that hadn’t been imaged by CTX by the time Dickson started working on this project, or areas obscured by clouds or dust. He manually stitched together the remaining 13,000 images that the algorithm couldn’t match. To create the new mosaic, Dickson developed an algorithm to match images based on the features they captured. The process is revealed in the image at right, showing how portions of CTX images were combined. ![]() How the Mosaic Combines CTX Images: The new global mosaic, shown in a detail example at left, is stitched together from images taken by MRO’s Context Camera, which captures the Martian surface in long strips. A bit like hunting for a needle in a haystack and putting together a puzzle at the same time, mapmaking requires downloading and sifting through a large selection of images to find those with the same lighting conditions and clear skies. Snapping away since MRO arrived at Mars in 2006, CTX has documented nearly all of the Red Planet, making its images an optimal starting point for scientists when they’re creating a map. A third camera, the Mars Color Imager ( MARCI), led by the same team that operates CTX, produces a daily global map of Mars weather at much lower spatial resolution. Its ability to capture larger expanses of the landscape has made CTX especially useful for spotting impact craters on the surface. In contrast, CTX provides a broader view of terrain around those features, helping scientists understand how they’re related. One of those cameras, the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment ( HiRISE) provides color images of surface features as small as a dining room table. Download image ›ĬTX is among three cameras aboard MRO, which is led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Global CTX Mosaic of Mars - Impact Craters: The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Context Camera, which captured the 110,000 images that make up the interactive global mosaic, is especially useful for spotting impact craters like those seen here. The goal is to lower the barriers for people who are interested in exploring Mars.” My mother, who just turned 78, can use this now. “I wanted something that would be accessible to everyone,” said Jay Dickson, the image processing scientist who led the project and manages the Murray Lab. But the mosaic is also easy enough for anyone to use. It is so detailed that more than 120 peer-reviewed science papers have already cited a beta version. ![]() ![]() The product of Caltech’s Bruce Murray Laboratory for Planetary Visualization, the mosaic took six years and tens of thousands of hours to develop. If it were printed out, this 5.7 trillion pixel (or 5.7 terapixel) mosaic would be large enough to cover the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, California. That makes the Global CTX Mosaic of Mars the highest-resolution global image of the Red Planet ever created. Taken by the veteran spacecraft’s black-and-white Context Camera, or CTX, the images cover nearly 270 square feet (25 square meters) of surface per pixel. Both scientists and the public can navigate a new global image of the Red Planet that was made at Caltech using data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.Ĭliffsides, impact craters, and dust devil tracks are captured in mesmerizing detail in a new mosaic of the Red Planet composed of 110,000 images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter ( MRO). ![]()
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