Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Delightful interactive map of Mars lets you take a wander with Perseverance rover

Georgina Torbet
By

If you’ve ever wanted to take a trip to Mars and go on a hike with the Perseverance rover, now is your chance. Researchers have created an interactive map of Mars’s Jezero Crater, letting you virtually wander around the planet’s surface and follow the rover’s path.

The interactive map shows data like topography, contour lines, and the rover’s path and current position within the crater. There are also panoramic views marked so you can zoom in and appreciate 360-degree views of the vistas of Mars.

Virtual view from top of the western delta into the crater.
Virtual view from the top of the western delta into the crater. HiRISE/CTX/HRSC

The map was presented at the Europlanet Science Congress 2022 by Sebastian Walter of the Freie Universität Berlin.

Recommended Videos

“The map is the perfect tool for planning a future visit to Mars, with an interactive interface where you can choose from different available base datasets,” Walter said in a statement. “Some of the slopes are pretty steep, so watch out for those if you want to avoid too much oxygen consumption! To get a real feeling of what to expect on your future Mars trip, you can click on one of the waypoint marker symbols to enter either a fullscreen 3D view or, if you have a Virtual Reality setup, to enter a fully immersive environment. You can even listen to the sounds of the rover if you stand close by.”

Related

The data for the map is a combination of data recorded by Perseverance, like the images from its Mastcam-Z camera and the sounds from its SuperCam instrument, and data taken from orbiters which forms the base layer of the map. This orbital data came from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, both of which are used to capture high-resolution images of the surface.

The map was originally designed for professional scientists, according to Walter, but as they added more data the research team realized it would be fun for the public to access as well.

“Initially we created the Jezero map as an outreach application to complement the HRSC Mapserver tool, which supports professional scientists to explore the Martian surface,” said Walter. “But as the rover returns more and more high-resolution image data and even audio recordings, it turns out to be the perfect tool for immersive visualization of that data in a scientific context by itself.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Map of Mars shows the location of ice beneath the planet’s surface
In this artist’s concept, NASA astronauts drill into the Martian subsurface. The agency has created new maps that show where ice is most likely to be easily accessible to future astronauts.

One of the challenges of sending human explorers to Mars is that, due to the logistics of the journey, they will have to be on the planet's surface for considerably longer than the missions of a few days which have been sent to the moon in the past. That means future explorers will need access to resources like food, water, and oxygen -- and rather than having to carry months' worth of supplies through space, it's far more efficient to find ways to produce those resources on Mars itself.

That's the idea behind searching for water ice deposits on Mars. There's plenty of ice on the surface around the planet's poles, but most mission concepts are more focused on the planet's equatorial region. The good news is that there is ice present in these areas too, but the bad news is that it's primarily located below the surface and is thus hard to locate.

Read more
Perseverance rover catches footage of a dust devil on Mars
mars 2020 perseverance rover

Many of the weather events we experience here on Earth can be found on other planets too, and that includes whirlwinds. Several missions have observed small whirlwinds called dust devils on Mars, and the Perseverance rover recently captured footage of one such dust devil in action as it rolled across the martian surface.

The footage was captured by one of Perseverance's black-and-white navigation cameras, called Navcams, and shows a dust devil moving at a speed of around 12 mph across a regions known as the Thorofare Ridge. You can clearly see the dust devil as a white column moving across the top of the ridge in an animation posted by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the rover.

Read more
Perseverance rover’s Mars oxygen machine comes to the end of its mission
Technicians at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory lower the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) instrument into the belly of the Perseverance rover.

The experiment to make oxygen on Mars has come to an end, with the Perseverance rover's MOXIE instrument completing its mission. MOXIE, or Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, is a small box tucked inside the rover that takes in carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and converts it into oxygen. After 16 successful runs, the experiment has now been concluded.

Technicians at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory lower the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) instrument into the belly of the Perseverance rover. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Read more