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3D Images Of Valles Marineris
EccentricAnomaly writes: "Adrian Lark and Olivier de Goursac have made some spectacular 3D renderings of the Valles Marineris of Mars from Mars Global Surveyor data. That site is in French, but space.com has a write-up in English. Some of the images are from the bottom of Melas Chasma, which is a possible landing site for the MER rovers in 2003. Adrian Lark has software that you can use to generate your own images with data from MGS's MOLA instrument."
Hm. 10 pictures at ~ 500k each.
That is 5M per client !!!!
Can someone say Slashdot effect!!!???
yow @Q#$@#$%^
Kevin
As these are generated, I wounder if we could get them in the next version of BattleZone, BZ III fight for Mars (uses real maps of Mars).
I think it would be cool
Mlk
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
I don't think that there is any question that at one point water was much more abundant on Mars than it is now, but those pictures really drive the nails into the coffin. Some of those formations are so obviously erosion effects that it's impossible not to see the connection.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Yes, they are breathtaking, yes they are very pretty.
But don't get too carried away, they have been heavily mediated from the raw data to make them look like what their creator wanted (and to some degree what was expected beforehand).
Thats not to say they're wrong, just don't take them as being canonical.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Don't be so sure.
Have a look at some of the pictures from central antarctica, which hasn't seen liquid water since the surface was formed.
Wind erosion can, over time, look a lot like what you associate with water.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Very heavy interpolation (better word than mine)
pretty, but never going to show anything we didn't already expect.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Although the first link in the article seems to have been thoroughly Slashdotted,
m /mars_renderings_011204-2.html)
the space.com link (http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsyste
and the mars3d.co.uk (http://mars3d.co.uk/)
happen to have some of the images, although not in as high a resolution.
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Floccinaucinihilipilification - the action or habit of judging something to be worthless
Great shading, looks like real geometric (not simulated) bump mapping, and atmospherics. What program did they use? POVRay or something else?
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Mola 3d map:/ mo la/mars3d.htm
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/spacesci/pictures
exxagerated altitude 3d renderings, valles marineris:
http://www.burningpixel.com/galeryim.htm
About the resolution... from Adrian Lark's site:
The MOLA data has a vertical accuracy of about 5m and a horizontal spatial accuracy of 100m.
As the MGS satellite orbits Mars it fires a laser every 330m to measure the height of the ground below. This means that in the direction of the orbit the resolution is 330m but in between the orbits the gaps can vary between a few meters to a few kilometers. My data processing software uses a linear interpolation algorithm to fill the gaps. Datasets created at higher resolutions require more interpolation because the gaps between the orbits are larger.
There's more information about the interpolation on the link above.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.