Jezero Crater on Mars was the landing site for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover. The colours in this image show surface minerals detected by CRISM, which helped identify the crater as a desirable landing site. The green colour represents carbonates, which are good at preserving fossils. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
A near-global map of Mars, composed of nearly 51,000 mapping strips mosaicked into 1,764 tiles. The grid overlay shows the boundaries of the individual tiles. An additional 100 tiles in each polar region — not included here — are being processed separately. The map shows familiar large-scale surface brightness patterns, largely governed by the distribution of bright-red iron oxide-bearing dust. Darker, relatively dust-free regions consist of impact-fragmented crustal rock and wind-blown sand.
Processing this much data into one cohesive map is a complicated task requiring powerful computing resources. It takes time to optimize the maps and account for environmental conditions and discrepancies between the different images.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is still going strong and has exceeded its planned mission length by several years. In 2018 NASA said it wants to keep the spacecraft operating through the late 2020s, at least. One of the obstacles to greater longevity is its aging gyroscopes, but NASA said they can rely on stellar navigation to maintain the spacecraft’s orientation. MRO’s HiRISE camera has captured almost 70,000 high-resolution images of the surface of Mars.
“The warranty on this thing expired years ago before my kids were even born,” Seelos said. “The CRISM investigation has been very long-lived, and the fact that we were able to take data for so many years is amazing. The release of these tiles is a kind of exclamation point for the instrument’s legacy.”
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