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Mars Express 3D Image Released
zoney_ie writes "As reported in BBC News Online, ESA (European Space Agency) have released an image of the surface of Mars, captured in 3D and full colour. Europe's Mars Express orbiter has been taking pictures of the Martian surface at down to 10m resolution. The mission will result in Mars being more carefully mapped than Earth has been to date! Full size image available on ESA's Mars Express Website."
As a NASA worker, I'd like to congradulate the ESA on their success with Mars Express.
Welcome to Mars!
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Science Activity Planner Developer
Mars Exploration Rovers
The mission will result in Mars being more carefully mapped than Earth has been to date!
"You never finish anything! Why don't you go and finish the Earth before you go running off to map some other silly planet?"
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Are these images copyrighted, or are they put straight into the public domain? It sure would be cool to play a realtime strategy game (Dune 2005? heh.) right on the surface of Mars!
a la NASA's "Blue Marble" images for Earth?
:)
That's one thing NASA has over ESA - they release a lot more material into the public domain... and this time I'm actually paying for it with my tax Euros, so I say they should release the images to us all
Well, let's think about this.
Considering we have publicly accessible aerial imagery down to 1m resolution (and you know the US military has sub-meter capability for their purposes) in selected areas, and 2m and 10m over the rest of the world, I'd say there is far more detail on Earth than Mars.
Further, the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission/SRTM mapped some 85% of the Earth's surface. Much of the data that mission generated is actually redundant, with some areas being scanned 3 times. This makes that data even more reliable, although it's fairly coarse at only 1arcsec resolution.
And IIRC, the Russian EGNOS (?) data covers Europe-to-Asia with decent resolution.
Anyway, I'm not busting the submitter's chops for this comment. I think the Mars mapping is fantastic, and I wish those of us interested in amateur digital cartography (now *there's* a party conversation topic) had equally easy access to Mars data.
Video games should make more use of all the terrain data governments generate.
Can't see a beagle, but I saw at least five new faces in the hi-res version
did anyone else notice the part in the ESA disclaimer about if the picture contained any recognizable individual.... wonder what they know about mars that we don't....