'Hiker's Maps' of Mars Created. When space travelers finally traipse across the dusty Martian surface, they'll know just what kind of terrain to expect thanks to scientists at the European Space Agency who are producing the first "hiker's maps" of the red planet. The new topographic maps, based on data collected by the ESA's Mars Express spacecraft, could become the standard cartographic reference for future Martian research, as well as exploration on foot. The ESA eventually will create topographic maps for the entire surface of Mars, which would mean more than 10,000 maps each of equal area.
For starters, researchers have created a map of the Iani Chaos region, chosen for the rock "islands" that litter the landscape in an interesting, chaotic pattern. These rocks are likely the remains of a previous Martian surface that collapsed when the ice supporting subsurface cavities melted from volcanic heat. All the maps will feature the names of geological features and detailed height contours of the landscape. Google Earth updates maps of Mars | Webware. There is now a lot more about Mars to view in Google Earth than there was just a month ago. Google announced Friday a major update to show more details of Mars both in its history and the present day. Originally the 3D maps of Mars were available with the release of Google Earth 5.0 , just a little more than a month ago. The update shows how our knowledge of Mars, and our study of astronomy, has evolved over time.
According to Google, the new update allows us to travel back in time to see the antique maps originally drawn by astronomers Giovanni Schiaparelli, Percival Lowell, and others. It also show present-day Mars with a "Live from Mars" layer, which is a continuous stream of the latest imagery, including those from NASA's THEMIS camera aboard the Mars Odyssey spacecraft. Users can have the feel of flying along with Odyssey as well as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to see what the two crafts have been observing lately and where they are headed next. Maps of all Mars images | Mars Odyssey Mission THEMIS. Geologic Map of Mars. Topographic Map of Mars | USGS I Map 2782. These maps are based on data from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA; Smith and others, 2001), an instrument on NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft (Albee and others, 2001). The image used for the base of this map represents more than 600 million measurements gathered between 1999 and 2001, adjusted for consistency (Neumann and others, 2001, 2003) and converted to planetary radii.
These have been converted to elevations above the areoid as determined from a martian gravity field solution GMM-2B (Lemoine and others, 2001), truncated to degree and order 50, and oriented according to current standards (see below). The average accuracy of each point is originally ~100 meters in horizontal position and ~1 meter in radius (Neumann and others, 2001). However, the total elevation uncertainty is at least ±3 m due to the global error in the areoid (±1.8 meters according to Lemoine and others [2001]) and regional uncertainties in its shape (G.A. Neumann, written commun., 2002). Mars Maps. Mars.