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Space Science

3D Images Of Valles Marineris 76

Posted by timothy from the night-sky dept.
EccentricAnomaly writes: "Adrian Lark and Olivier de Goursac have made some spectacular 3D renderings of the Valles Marineris of Mars from Mars Global Surveyor data. That site is in French, but space.com has a write-up in English. Some of the images are from the bottom of Melas Chasma, which is a possible landing site for the MER rovers in 2003. Adrian Lark has software that you can use to generate your own images with data from MGS's MOLA instrument."
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3D Images Of Valles Marineris More

3D Images Of Valles Marineris

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  • new desktop pictures!
  • Hm. 10 pictures at ~ 500k each.

    That is 5M per client !!!!

    Can someone say Slashdot effect!!!???

    yow @Q#$@#$%^

    Kevin
  • Can anyone speculate what this may actually do to perpetuate Mars interest? Any ideas what it will do for the community?
  • Those pictures remind me of some random desert I visited when I was younger. It seems Mars should be a National Park before we even get there.

  • wery pritty... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mlk ( 18543 )
    As these are generated, I wounder if we could get them in the next version of BattleZone, BZ III fight for Mars (uses real maps of Mars).

    I think it would be cool
    Mlk
    • I think they (Activition) used NASA photos for the planets in Battlezone (PC edition). I know the Moon had satellite imagery, and I'd bet that Mars did too.

      The terrain wasn't modeled after Mars, though, since it had to be molded to fit the mission.

      "GhostFire" - former PlanetBattlezone site director
  • I don't think that there is any question that at one point water was much more abundant on Mars than it is now, but those pictures really drive the nails into the coffin. Some of those formations are so obviously erosion effects that it's impossible not to see the connection.

    • Antarctica (Score:3, Informative)

      by child_of_mercy ( 168861 )
      Don't be so sure.

      Have a look at some of the pictures from central antarctica, which hasn't seen liquid water since the surface was formed.
      Wind erosion can, over time, look a lot like what you associate with water.
      • If you are talking about the central regions of the ice-shield - they look very different. The calabatic winds streaming down from the heights
        of the shield do not form real valleys (I've pictures and an article about that here in front of me, but it is hardcopy, so no link). These valleys are mainly formed by "solid flowing water" (aka ice, glaciers) and
        are occuring only near the edge of the shield
        towards the sea.
        Wind erosion looks indeed different and that
        has been discussed for a long time.
    • Water or liquid CO2?

      Please remember that more than one liquid could have this effect!

  • mediated images (Score:2, Informative)

    by child_of_mercy ( 168861 )
    Yes, they are breathtaking, yes they are very pretty.

    But don't get too carried away, they have been heavily mediated from the raw data to make them look like what their creator wanted (and to some degree what was expected beforehand).

    Thats not to say they're wrong, just don't take them as being canonical.

  • Intelligent commentary (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Intelligent, unbiased commentary on this development may be found here [artbell.com] and here [enterprisemission.com].
  • The article on space.com says "The resolution of the dataset was roughly 600mx600m." Except for the last two pictures, these images look like they're around 10m resolution minimum. Is my sense of scale all wrong here, or is there some heavy interpolation going on?

    Brant
    • Very heavy interpolation (better word than mine)

      pretty, but never going to show anything we didn't already expect.
    • About the resolution... from Adrian Lark's site [demonews.com]:

      The MOLA data has a vertical accuracy of about 5m and a horizontal spatial accuracy of 100m.

      As the MGS satellite orbits Mars it fires a laser every 330m to measure the height of the ground below. This means that in the direction of the orbit the resolution is 330m but in between the orbits the gaps can vary between a few meters to a few kilometers. My data processing software uses a linear interpolation algorithm to fill the gaps. Datasets created at higher resolutions require more interpolation because the gaps between the orbits are larger.

      There's more information about the interpolation on the link above.

  • Other Render Sources (Score:2, Informative)

    by taion ( 304184 )
    Although the first link in the article seems to have been thoroughly Slashdotted,

    the space.com link (http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem /mars_renderings_011204-2.html [space.com])

    and the mars3d.co.uk (http://mars3d.co.uk/ [mars3d.co.uk])

    happen to have some of the images, although not in as high a resolution.
  • Great shading, looks like real geometric (not simulated) bump mapping, and atmospherics. What program did they use? POVRay or something else?
  • Wow. That makes me want to head out to the library and grab "Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson for another re-read. Great, epic, hard SF story of the colonization of Mars. Those pics re-vamped my whole visualization for the book. I always pictured it as much smoother/less craggy, especially where they first landed.

    Are there any other good hard-SF Mars books for me to dig into? I think I may have to go on a Mars reading binge.

    Brant
  • Mola 3d map:
    http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/spacesci/pictures/ mo la/mars3d.htm

    exxagerated altitude 3d renderings, valles marineris:
    http://www.burningpixel.com/galeryim.htm
  • I hadn't heard of "Valles Marineris" before, so the first thing that entered my mind was that it was the name of some supermodel or something, and they made her into some posable high-res 3D toy, and took some screenshots. Like playing with Poser. ;)

    Hurray for ignorance! ;D
  • These are damn beautiful. I wish they were posted in a PNG format so that there wouldn't be those nasty JPG effects.

  • copyright (Score:2, Funny)

    by rwaldin ( 318317 )
    Nice pictures, but...
    Those images cannot be printed, sold or distributed by any mean (including Internet) without the previous consent of the Author
    Hmmm. Does that mean my ISP just broke the law? -Ray
  • Here is the same in English from NASA [nasa.gov]
  • Those images cannot be printed, sold or distributed by any mean (including Internet) without the previous consent of the Author.

    Cache anyone ?

  • These pictures are pretty good. However, staying on track.. they still haven't located that Turbinium reactor yet to give Mars an atmosphere... much less the Pyramid Mines.
  • Wake me when they start rendering pictures of the Mars Anomaly of the Week, then we'll have something to talk about.
  • As some have remarked , there is a restricted use text on the page.
    I happen to just come back home from a presentation at my daughter's school of those and other martian images, presentation made by Olivier de Goursac, that is the author of the page, and of the images. (Note to american reader : yes there are people in France, including scientist and /. readers).
    I asked him about the copy restriction, and his argument is as follow :
    It doesn't matter if an individual print and copy those images for his personnal use, but there where recently problems with a news agency which removed the references of the creators (look at the images) and sold them for quite a huge sum of money as print, privatizing public images, and preventing others to benefit freely (as in beer, at least) of the effort of Nasa and Mars society.
    This introduce a question we can perhaps ask also in another thread to L. Lessig : is it possible, given present and future copyright law, to protect the public domain, à la GPL, with something like : (c) Mankind, copy restriction prohibited.
  • Wow, a whole planet covered by sand and rocks. I could almost see a band of fremen walking across the canyon or a sandworm beginning to surface.

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