June 14 () –
A USGS (US Geological Survey) team used cloud computing and supercomputers to process a treasure trove of data to experience the landscape of Mars in high resolution and in 3D.
The research incorporates more than 4,800 digital terrain modelsknown as DTM, and more than 155,000 ultra-high-resolution images of the planet’s surface.
“Now anyone on the planet with a smartphone can find, use and marvel at this data.said Jay Laura, leader of the USGS Astrogeology Science Center team that processed the data. A taste of the power of the new tool focuses on the Valles Marineris region.
The topographic data comes from the context camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The context camera provides images with a resolution of about 6 meters per pixel covering strips 30 km wide and up to 160 km long.
To produce a DTM, two overlapping images of the same area go through sophisticated computer processing to create a 3D view of the overlapping area, just as our brains process information from both eyes for depth perception, the USGS reports. it’s a statement.
To do this, the USGS astrogeology team first roughly aligned individual DTMs with the low-resolution global topography, then fed all those roughly aligned DTMs into the computer, working in batches of several hundred DTMs at a time. This required an enormous amount of computer processing, so the USGS Denali supercomputer located in the Eros Data Center was used. to process the data over the course of a few weeks.
The 4,800 DTMs published so far are just the tip of the iceberg. They represent pairs that were collected together with pairs from higher-resolution images from the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. There are thousands of other possible CTX image pairs that the Astrogeology Science Center is working to process, which will eventually result in even higher topographic coverage at 20 meters per pixel.
