Flying Over Valles Marineris, Mars with Analysis-Ready Data

Flyover of Valles Marineris, the "Grand Canyon" of Mars, highlighting two analysis-ready datasets provided by USGS. The canyon is more than 4,000 km (2,500 miles) long and up to 7 km (23,000 ft) deep. High-resolution (~20 m per pixel) elevation data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) Context (CTX) camera are shown with a blue-to-yellow color scale indicating low-to-high elevations. The pink rectangles mark locations where extremely high-resolution (~25 cm per pixel) photos from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) are available. The video zooms into a single HiRISE image: ESP_012005_1700_COLOR. The image is mostly grayscale, but a central band is displayed in shades of blue. This is not the actual color of Mars, it is a "false color" used to visualize a combination of infrared, red, and blue light. The HiRISE image is draped over the high-resolution topography so that it can be viewed from an angle, just as if you were flying over this part of Mars.

A total of over 4,000 CTX digital terrain models and over 155,000 HiRISE images are now freely available.