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A 5.7 Terapixel Mosaic of the Surface of Mars
- maukdaddy 3y agoActual site: https://murray-lab.caltech.edu/CTX/ https://murray-lab.caltech.edu/CTX/
- janeway 3y agoWow that 3D viewer is smooth on mobile phone. So amazing to pinch and scroll around the planet.
- OJFord 3y agoAre there photos anywhere? The 3D viewer's just showing black for me. (Viewer itself loaded, but as though no data specified/loaded - except what I assume are different views to jump to listed at the bottom.)
- zokier 3y agoDownloadable dataset here: https://murray-lab.caltech.edu/CTX/V01/tiles/ https://murray-lab.caltech.edu/CTX/V01/tiles/ Please do not hammer the service unnecessarily, it's nice that they offer this publicly so lets not ruin the commons here.
- vmfunction 3y agowow a lot of big files, maybe they should publish it over WebTorrent
- yootyootr 3y agoAbolutely stunning that you can hand your child a tablet and let them browse a google earth style depiction of another planet in such detail. Inspiring.
- knorker 3y agoWow. This is the most inspiring thing I've seen since the video of two boosters landing side by side.
- danbruc 3y agoFor comparison, Earth including water surfaces at one meter resolution would be 510 Tpx.
- zokier 3y agoThis was published two months ago but didn't get much attention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35501337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35501337 https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/new-interactive-mosaic-uses-nasa-imagery-to-show-mars-in-vivid-detail https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/new-interactive-mosaic-uses...
- briga 3y agoGenuinely amazing piece of technology, this is so cool
- jillesvangurp 3y agoMany years ago, X-Plane version 8 or 9 included Mars scenery. This would make for a nice upgrade of that. The scenery was a bit lacking in detail and the atmosphere and gravity were of course adjusted. Pretty hard to fly there because the atmosphere is very thin. So, basically, you need some kind of rocket plane that flies at insane speeds. Makes for interesting take offs and landings.
- JshWright 3y agoThere is currently a propeller driven VTOL aircraft operating on Mars. The thin atmosphere definitely poses some challenges, but those are offset a little by the lower gravity. It's not easy, but it can definitely be done (as Ingenuity as shown)
- 2Gkashmiri 3y agowatching natgeo and discovery science shows (before they went to shit) years ago, i remember one time the narrator was saying something like "in future, nasa plans to fly unmanned unattended drones which will automatically decide the flight plan and navigation and collision avoidance because the roundtrip communication with earth is at best 20 minutes so it would be unfeasible to fly-by-wire from earth. at the time, it was genuinely sci-fi that we can send a small airplane to mars and have it zip across the skies there without human intervention and today that is already history. wow.
- scrumper 3y agoOr much bigger wings. Pretty viable given the gravity.
- swiftcoder 3y agoThat's spectacular. I'm curious how much storage space the entire dataset consumes in it's compresed form?
- zokier 3y ago> The mosaic images are stored in zip files that reduce the download size. The entire mosaic (compressed) is 5.6 TB, including seam maps but not including overviews for the GeoTiff files. Unzipped and uncompressed, the entire mosaic is 11.484 TB, including overviews.
- q87b 3y agoIt's quite amazing and simultaneously ridiculous that we have a public 3D model of a distant planet at 5 meters resolution while the best available free and public models of Earth are at 30 meters.
- TomasD 3y agoYou can fly your satellites lower in mars due to atmosphere density, as low as 20km it appears
- dewey 3y agoOn top of that isn't the lower resolution on earth more for military reasons than a technical one or is this not the case any more?
- zokier 3y agoHasn't been really the case since french airbus started offering highres global imagery. If you have deep pockets, you can buy 30cm/px (i.e. order of magnitude better than this Mars dataset) images of pretty much anything.
- generalizations 3y agoI wonder if there's any sources for those images that aren't cough restricted. Could be interesting to play with, though maybe not worth paying for.
- zokier 3y agoWhat do you mean, there are many resources that provide access to various satellite images. In general satellite imaging is not really that sort of hushhush industry it maybe was 50 years ago.
- IntrepidWorm 3y ago
- ta1243 3y agoSo each pixel is about 5m x 5m? With Mars having a surface area of about 145 million square km, or 145 trillion square metres
- qwertox 3y agoPerseverance's path puzzled me. The good thing is that NASA has an up-to-date map [0] of its path, also joined by lines, which shows more of the path and also confirms how odd some stretches of its voyage have been. Does anyone know why it spent so much time going back and forth? --- Edit: I see, it was always going back to the "Sample Depot Zone" to deposit the collected samples. This zone is where the chaos begins after the very long stretch. Here's [1] more info on the depot, including a photo made by the rover of what such a deposited sample looks like. --- [0] https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/where-is-the-rover/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/where-is-the-rover/ [1] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-perseverance-rover-completes-mars-sample-depot https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-perseverance-rover-c...
- t1234s 3y agoThe face is located at 40.747484°N, 009.462645°W
- japanuspus 3y agoFor anyone who studies Martian geology: What is the deal with the 5km deep gorge extending for 1000's of km around -70.654932°, -11.473828°? It looks like the planet was almost torn in half. (Turn on "MOLA Topography"-layer to see it)
- poulpy123 3y agoit's valles marineris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valles_Marineris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valles_Marineris
- arethuza 3y agoThe largest feature on Mars is so vast that it isn't normally visible: the Northern hemisphere is quite a bit lower than the Southern (1 to 3 km): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_dichotomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_dichotomy Edit: Very obvious in Google Maps Mars: https://www.google.com/mars/ https://www.google.com/mars/
- tiffanyh 3y agoSphinx on Mars Does anyone know the more precise coordinates for the Sphinx on Mars that 40.75, 9.46? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydonia_(Mars) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydonia_(Mars)
- Tepix 3y agoI'd like to buy a mars globe with a nice up-to-date high-res print of the surface. The globes i have seen are expensive and have outdated maps.
- hammock 3y ago>5.0 m/px How does that compare to , e.g. aerial photography resolution or some familiar standard ? Edit: ChatGPT gave me: .28 cm/px for a studio portrait photo (factor 2000x) 8.3 cm/px for a landscape photo (factor 60x) 30-200 cm/px for aerial photos (factor 2-20x)
- zokier 3y agoCommercial satellites imaging Earth can do about 30cm/px (or .3m/px), conventional aerial photos are afaik in the ballpark of 5cm/px, drones can do <1cm/px The special thing about this Murray mosaic is that it seamless continuous image across the whole Mars surface, they spent lot of time gluing and stitching the raw images together. Furthermore, important for science, each pixel can afaik be traced back to specific capture, so there is provenance.
- dang 3y agoUrl changed from https://kottke.org/23/06/a-massive-57-terapixel-mosaic-of-the-surface-of-mars https://kottke.org/23/06/a-massive-57-terapixel-mosaic-of-th..., which points to this.
- nektro 3y agoand still black and white