NASA has just unveiled an interactive map of Mars thanks to which you can contemplate every nook and cranny of the red planet from the sofa in your living room. According to Ouest-France, this tool called The Global CTX Mosaic of Mars covers 99.5% of the Martian surface.

Six years of work

To do this, the scientists used photos taken since 2005 as part of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. These shots are immortalized by the high-resolution HiRISE camera, carried aboard a probe launched into orbit around the Red Planet.

In order to get an almost complete mapping of Mars, NASA researchers also used images provided by the CTX pop-up camera. Thanks to the work of the Bruce Murrey Laboratory for Planetary Visualization at the California Institute of Technology (United States), they have succeeded after six years of work to achieve "the highest resolution of the red planet ever created", as NASA said on April 5.

A tool accessible to all

"The goal is to make it accessible to anyone interested in Mars exploration," said project leader Jay Dickson. According to him, schoolchildren and retirees can now travel to Mars via their computers. Landmarks are made available on the site to facilitate their interactive journey. They will then be able to go there with a simple click, and zoom in at leisure to inspect more closely the places unearthed by the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers.



Thanks to an integrated measurement tool, Internet users can, for example, see that the Martian volcano Olympus Mons rises to 21 kilometers above the reference level of the Red Planet, an altitude about five times higher than the highest volcano on Earth. The summit of Mauna Loa (Hawaii) is 4,169 meters above sea level.

  • Sciences
  • March
  • Space