MGS MOLA Global Colorized Hillshade

This map is based on data from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA; Smith and others, 2001), an instrument on NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft (Albee and others, 2001). The image used for the base of this map represents more than 600 million measurements gathered between 1999 and 2001, adjusted for consistency (Neumann and others, 2001, 2003) and converted to planetary radii. These have been converted to elevations above the areoid as determined from a Martian gravity field solution GMM-2B (Lemoine and others, 2001), truncated to degree and order 50, and oriented according to current standards (see below). The average accuracy of each point is originally ~100 meters in horizontal position and ~1 meter in radius (Neumann and others, 2001). However, the total elevation uncertainty is at least ±3 m due to the global error in the areoid (±1.8 meters according to Lemoine and others [2001]) and regional uncertainties in its shape (G.A. Neumann, written commun., 2002).