Viewing the Martian landscape is now easier than ever before, due to a brand new map generated from a treasure trove of information collected by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The brand new map, compiled with the assistance of supercomputers and cloud computing, provides a high-resolution, three-dimensional experience of Mars‘ otherworldly terrain.
The map, processed by a team on the U.S. Geological Survey‘s (USGS) Astrogeology Science Center, consists of over 4,800 digital terrain models (DTMs) and greater than 155,000 images of the Martian surface.
“Now anyone on the planet with a smartphone can search, use and marvel at these data,” team leader Jay Laura, of the Astrogeology Science Center (ASC), said in an announcement.
“These data are vital because they democratize the supply of high-quality Mars topographic data,” Laura added. “Getting consistent, well-aligned results shouldn’t be easy. We felt it was vital to generate and release these products in order that others could freely access the info. When these data are highly accessible, anyone can contribute to scientific discovery.”
The Martian topographic data utilized by the team was collected by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter‘s (MRO) Context Camera, which might capture images with a resolution of around 6 meters per pixel covering an area of as much as around 18.5 miles (30 kilometers) wide and 100 miles (160 km) long.
The team then produced DTMs by overlapping two images of the identical area and processing them with a supercomputer to create an in depth 3D view. The method is comparable to how visual data collected by each our eyes is processed by the brain to generate our sense of depth perception and create a 3D picture of our surroundings, team members said.
Seamlessly aligning pairs of images to one another after which to the topography of Mars is, nevertheless, not as easy as it could sound. First, Laura and the USGS team needed to line up individual DTMs to global low-resolution topography after which deliver this information back to the Denali supercomputer, situated on the Eros Data Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
This was done in batches of several hundred DTMs without delay, requiring an enormous amount of computing power and several other weeks to process. The procedure would take an ordinary laptop computer between two and 35 years of continuous processing to realize, team members said.
The 4,800 DTMs are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Mars data, with the ASC team currently working on 1000’s of other image pairs that ought to lead to improved topographic coverage of Mars at 20 meters per pixel.
Moreover, the image pairs were collected alongside higher resolution image pairs gathered by one other MRO camera, the even sharper-eyed High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE).
Though they cover smaller patches of Mars’ surface, just 3.7 miles (6 km) wide by 37 miles (60 km) long, the HiRISE images have a resolution of 25 cm (9.8 in) per pixel. This implies each HiRISE image is full of detail but has an enormous data size — 1 GB and above, team members said.
Scientists have a troublesome time coping with such detailed photos; efforts to accomplish that previously have involved downloading full images in an area of investigation one after the other after which processing them in order that they might be viewed at different zoom levels.
So the ASC team has worked to process your complete catalog of 155,000 HiRISE images, comparable to around 114 TB of information, making them streamable and accessible freed from charge. Throughout the processing, the info was streamed from the NASA Planetary Data System cloud holdings, with over 4,000 images processed concurrently and your complete dataset taking just below 4 hours to finish.
The testing and refining of this processing pipeline ensured that it produced reliable and useful images. Which means evaluation can now be conducted within the cloud, and data might be accessed without the necessity to download whole images. The streamable data can then be examined on a smartphone or downloaded in a ready-to-use format that does not require processing, team members said.
Huge data sets of fully processed images like this have been highlighted by the NASA Planetary Data Ecosystem Independent Review Board as vital in supporting the appliance of AI and machine learning to planetary science.
“These data are ripe for discovery and use by machines and humans,” Laura said. “This data release signifies that the HiRISE data set can now be seamlessly leveraged by machine-learning scientists.”
The info is hosted by Amazon in the corporate’s Open Data Registry, and it’s free for anyone to make use of. With a purpose to make the info easier to search out and download, thus ensuring it’s more accessible to most of the people, the USGS has released search tools for users.
“With data releases like this, USGS is taking the result in develop and release analysis-ready planetary science data,” Laura concluded.