A virtual hiking map for Jezero crater, the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover landing site

Potential Mars explorers can now take a hike across the touchdown web site of NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover with an interactive map loaded with orbital imagery, terrain knowledge in addition to artificial and actual 3D panoramic views of Jezero crater and its surrounding space. The map, which might be accessed via a traditional net browser, has been offered at the moment on the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2022 in Granada, Spain, by Sebastian Walter of the Freie Universität Berlin.

“The map is the proper device for planning a future go to to Mars, with an interactive interface the place you possibly can select from completely different out there base datasets. A few of the slopes are fairly steep, so be careful for these if you wish to keep away from an excessive amount of oxygen consumption!” stated Sebastian Walter.

“To get an actual feeling of what to anticipate in your future Mars journey, you possibly can click on on one of many waypoint marker symbols to enter both a fullscreen 3D view or, you probably have a Digital Actuality setup, to enter a totally immersive surroundings. You’ll be able to even hearken to the sounds of the rover when you stand shut by, however please do not contact it—in any other case you’d contaminate the probes.”

The map permits digital hikers to zoom out and in, and pan quickly throughout scenes, in order that they’ll discover the panorama from massive scales all the way down to centimeter-detail. A few of the 360° panoramas built-in with the waypoints have been synthetically rendered from orbital picture knowledge.

Others are actual panoramas stitched collectively from a mess of single pictures taken by the Mastcam-Z digicam instrument onboard the Mars 2020 Rover Perseverance, which have been supplied by the College of Arizona. The sounds have been recorded by the SuperCam instrument on that very same rover mission.

The bottom layer of the map is a merged dataset derived from three completely different devices at present orbiting Mars: the HRSC on Mars Specific, and the Context Digital camera (CTX) and Excessive Decision Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) devices on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The HiRISE knowledge has been supplied by supplied by the Terrain Relative Navigation (TRN) staff of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

The Jezero map builds on the info portal of the Excessive Decision Stereo Digital camera (HRSC) instrument of ESA’s Mars Specific mission, which supplies instruments to visualise and disseminate massive quantities of Mars pictures and terrain knowledge in a web-based surroundings.

“Initially we created the Jezero map as an outreach software to enrich the HRSC Mapserver device, which helps skilled scientists to discover the Martian floor,” stated Sebastian Walter. “However because the rover returns an increasing number of high-resolution picture knowledge and even audio recordings, it seems to be the proper device for immersive visualization of that knowledge in a scientific context by itself.”

Supplied by
Europlanet