It's quite amazing and simultaneously ridiculous that we have a public 3D model of a distant planet at 5 meters resolution while the best available free and public models of Earth are at 30 meters.
A 5.7 Terapixel Mosaic of the Surface of Mars
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Re: A 5.7 Terapixel Mosaic of the Surface of Mars
#12Actual site: https://murray-lab.caltech.edu/CTX/
Wow that 3D viewer is smooth on mobile phone. So amazing to pinch and scroll around the planet.
Re: A 5.7 Terapixel Mosaic of the Surface of Mars
#13It's quite amazing and simultaneously ridiculous that we have a public 3D model of a distant planet at 5 meters resolution while the best available free and public models of Earth are at 30 meters.
You can fly your satellites lower in mars due to atmosphere density, as low as 20km it appears
Re: A 5.7 Terapixel Mosaic of the Surface of Mars
#14So each pixel is about 5m x 5m? With Mars having a surface area of about 145 million square km, or 145 trillion square metres
Re: A 5.7 Terapixel Mosaic of the Surface of Mars
#15It's quite amazing and simultaneously ridiculous that we have a public 3D model of a distant planet at 5 meters resolution while the best available free and public models of Earth are at 30 meters.
You can fly your satellites lower in mars due to atmosphere density, as low as 20km it appears
On top of that isn't the lower resolution on earth more for military reasons than a technical one or is this not the case any more?
Re: A 5.7 Terapixel Mosaic of the Surface of Mars
#16It's quite amazing and simultaneously ridiculous that we have a public 3D model of a distant planet at 5 meters resolution while the best available free and public models of Earth are at 30 meters.
You can fly your satellites lower in mars due to atmosphere density, as low as 20km it appears
And presumably the atmospheric distortion is much less as well.
Re: A 5.7 Terapixel Mosaic of the Surface of Mars
#17Re: A 5.7 Terapixel Mosaic of the Surface of Mars
#18Many years ago, X-Plane version 8 or 9 included Mars scenery. This would make for a nice upgrade of that. The scenery was a bit lacking in detail and the atmosphere and gravity were of course adjusted. Pretty hard to fly there because the atmosphere is very thin. So, basically, you need some kind of rocket plane that flies at insane speeds. Makes for interesting take offs and landings.
There is currently a propeller driven VTOL aircraft operating on Mars. The thin atmosphere definitely poses some challenges, but those are offset a little by the lower gravity. It's not easy, but it can definitely be done (as Ingenuity as shown)
watching natgeo and discovery science shows (before they went to shit) years ago, i remember one time the narrator was saying something like "in future, nasa plans to fly unmanned unattended drones which will automatically decide the flight plan and navigation and collision avoidance because the roundtrip communication with earth is at best 20 minutes so it would be unfeasible to fly-by-wire from earth.
at the time, it was genuinely sci-fi that we can send a small airplane to mars and have it zip across the skies there without human intervention and today that is already history. wow.
Re: A 5.7 Terapixel Mosaic of the Surface of Mars
#19So each pixel is about 5m x 5m? With Mars having a surface area of about 145 million square km, or 145 trillion square metres
Correct.
Re: A 5.7 Terapixel Mosaic of the Surface of Mars
#20It's quite amazing and simultaneously ridiculous that we have a public 3D model of a distant planet at 5 meters resolution while the best available free and public models of Earth are at 30 meters.
WorldView-3 claims to be 31cm resolution: https://worldview3.digitalglobe.com/