If you head to the map website, you’ll get an overview of the planet. Then you can use the buttons at the bottom to zoom into some of the most important locations on Mars, such as the Jezero Crater where the Perseverance rover is currently exploring, or the Gale Crater where the Curiosity rover is located. There are also links for visiting the locations of now-defunct rovers like Spirit and Opportunity.
Some of the other fun locations to visit are of geological interest, like Olympus Mons, a shield volcano that is the largest mountain in the solar system and which stands two and a half times the height of Mount Everest. Other places not to miss are the Valles Marineris canyon system which stretches over 2,500 miles long and goes as deep as 4 miles down, and the Medusae Fossae formation which is a strange and dramatic landscape sculpted by volcanic activity.
Or you can just browse around the planet’s surface, enjoying the mosaic, which has an incredible total of 5.7 trillion pixels. The researchers who created the map spent six years working on it, and it was designed for scientific work as well as for the public to enjoy. “I wanted something that would be accessible to everyone,” said image processor Jay Dickson of Caltech’s Bruce Murray Laboratory for Planetary Visualization, who led the project. “Schoolchildren can use this now. My mother, who just turned 78, can use this now. The goal is to lower the barriers for people who are interested in exploring Mars.”
[Featured image by ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) via ESA | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO]
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