Flying Over Valles Marineris, Mars with Analysis-Ready Data

Flyover of Valles Marineris, the “Grand Canyon“ of Mars, highlighting two analysis ready datasets provided by USGS. The canyon is more than 4,000 km (2,500 miles) long and up to 7 km (23,000 ft) deep. High resolution (~20 m per pixel) elevation data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) Context (CTX) camera are shown with a blue-to-yellow color scale indicating low-to-high elevations. The pink rectangles mark locations where extremely high resolution (~25 cm per pixel) photos from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) are available. The video zooms in to a single HiRISE image: ESP_012005_1700_COLOR. The image is mostly grayscale, but a central band is displayed in shades of blue. This is not the actual color of Mars, it is “false color“ used to visualize a combination of infrared, red, and blue light. The HiRISE image is draped over the high resolution topography so that it can be viewed from an angle, just as if you were flying over this part of Mars. A total of over 4,000 CTX digital terrain models and over 155,000 HiRISE images are now freely available. ===== USGS video: Analysis Ready Data: