Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, April 17 (Xinhua) Mars is one of the most mysterious planets in the solar system, and its physiognomy, climate and history have attracted scientists and the public to explore. Now, Bruce Murray's Planetary Visualization Lab at the California Institute of Technology has created an unprecedented global image of Mars using data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, allowing us to see the red planet in an unprecedented way.

The image is a mosaic of 110000 black-and-white environment cameras (CTX) from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, covering almost all parts of Mars, with each pixel corresponding to an area of about 25 square meters of the Martian surface. This is the highest-resolution global image of Mars, with a total of 5.7 trillion pixels, and if printed, it will be enough to cover the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, California.

It took six years and tens of thousands of hours to make the image. Not only is it of great value to scientific research, more than 120 peer-reviewed scientific papers have cited its beta version, but it is also public-friendly and can be easily used by anyone. Jay Dixon, an image processing scientist in charge of the project and managing Murray Lab, said: "I hope this image will be accessible to everyone." students can use it, and so can my 78-year-old mother. our goal is to reduce the obstacles for those interested in Mars to explore it. "

CTX is one of three cameras on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The other two cameras are the High Resolution Imaging Science experiment (HiRISE) and the Mars Color Imager (MARCI). HiRISE can provide color images of Martian surface features with table-size clarity. In contrast, CTX can provide a broader perspective to help scientists understand the relationship between these features. CTX is particularly useful for discovering craters on the surface of Mars. MARCI can generate a low-resolution global map of Martian weather every day.

According to CTOnews.com, CTX has been photographing the red planet since the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter arrived on Mars in 2006. Map making requires downloading and screening a large number of images to find images with the same lighting conditions and clear skies. In order to make this image, Dixon developed an algorithm to match images with the same features. He also manually stitched the remaining 13000 images that could not be matched by the algorithm. The gaps in the image represent areas of Mars that were not yet photographed by CTX when Dixon started the project, or areas obscured by clouds or dust.

The image received feedback from JPL Martian scientist Laura Cobb, who said: "I have wanted this image for a long time. It is not only a beautiful work of art, but also a useful scientific tool." Cobb recently used this image to visit her favorite Martian site: the Medusa Rock, a dusty area the size of Mongolia. Scientists are not sure exactly how it was formed; Cobb once suggested that it may have been formed by the ash of a nearby volcano. In the CTX image, she can zoom in to see the ancient rivers and gullies that have now dried up. Users can also jump to other regions, such as the Gale crater and Jazelo crater being explored by NASA's Curiosity and Endurance probes, or visit Mount Olympus, the highest volcano in the solar system, and add topographic data from the NASA Mars Global Mapper mission. One of the coolest features in the image is to highlight craters across the planet so that viewers can see how scarred Mars is.

"for 17 years, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been showing us something we've never seen before," said Ricky Zurek, a scientist at JPL's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter program. "this image is a whole new way to explore some of the images we've collected."

The image is part of the NASA Planetary data Archiving, recovery and tool (PDART) project, which aims to develop new ways to leverage existing NASA data.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.