Skip to main content

NASA’s new interactive mosaic shows Mars in amazing detail

NASA has launched a new interactive tool that shows Mars in extraordinary detail and lets you travel between points of interest at the click of a mouse.

The extraordinary Global CTX Mosaic of Mars comprises 110,000 images captured by the Context Camera — or CTX — aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Recommended Videos

In a post on its website, NASA describes the mosaic as “the highest-resolution global image of the red planet ever created.” To push the point home, it adds: “If it were printed out, this 5.7-trillion-pixel (or 5.7 terapixel) mosaic would be large enough to cover the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, California.”

It took Caltech’s Bruce Murray Laboratory for Planetary Visualization six years and tens of thousands of hours to develop.

When you visit the mosaic, you’ll be presented with a viewpoint that’s some way above the Martian surface.

At the bottom of the display, you’ll find a bunch of suggestions for places to visit. Start by selecting Jezero Crater, the ancient dried lake bed where NASA’s Perseverance rover has been searching for evidence of ancient microbial life for the last couple of years, and the site of the Ingenuity helicopter’s numerous flights.

Once you’ve had a good look around by using the buttons or mouse to zoom in and out, you can get an excellent idea of the enormous distance between Perseverance and NASA’s other operational rover, Curiosity, by selecting the button for the older vehicle. As you do so, the view will gently elevate and smoothly sweep across the terrain in a similar way to how Google Earth moves between locations.

If you discover something of interest by yourself and want to come back to it later, simply bookmark the location using one of the buttons on the left side of the display.

Jay Dickson, the image processing scientist who led the project and manages the Murray Lab, said of the mosaic: “I wanted something that would be accessible to everyone. Schoolchildren can use this now. My mother, who just turned 78, can use this now. The goal is to lower the barriers for people who are interested in exploring Mars.”

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
NASA has two ideas for how to get samples back from Mars
An illustration of NASA's Sample Return Lander shows it tossing a rocket in the air like a toy from the surface of Mars.

NASA has big goals for Mars. It wants to collect the first-ever samples from the Martian surface and deliver them back to Earth in an ambitious mission called Mars Sample Return. But even in its development phase, the mission has run into problems. With a ballooning budget and unrealistic time frame, NASA decided last year that it needed a new approach to the mission, and now it has announced an update. It's working on two ideas, with the best to be chosen in 2026.

“Pursuing two potential paths forward will ensure that NASA is able to bring these samples back from Mars with significant cost and schedule saving compared to the previous plan,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “These samples have the potential to change the way we understand Mars, our universe, and – ultimately – ourselves. I’d like to thank the team at NASA and the strategic review team, led by Dr. Maria Zuber, for their work.”

Read more
NASA’s exciting 2024 began with a crash that ended a historic mission
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, right, stands near the apex of a sand ripple in an image taken by Perseverance on Feb. 24, 2024, about five weeks after the rotorcraft’s final flight. Part of one of Ingenuity’s rotor blades lies on the surface about 49 feet (15 meters) west of helicopter (at left in image).

NASA had a busy 2024, overseeing space station operations, monitoring a slew of ongoing missions, preparing for upcoming Artemis lunar flights, and much more.

It also began the year with a fully functioning helicopter on Mars.

Read more
NASA orbiter captures one last image of retired InSight lander on Mars
This illustration shows NASA's InSight spacecraft with its instruments deployed on the Martian surface.

NASA's Insight lander spent four years on the surface of Mars, uncovering secrets of the planet's interior, but it eventually succumbed to the most martian of environmental threats: dust. Mars has periodic dust storms that can whip up into huge global events, lifting dust up into the air and then dumping it on everything in sight -- including solar panels. After years of accumulation, eventually the dust was so thick that Insight's solar panels could no longer generate enough power to keep it operational, and the mission officially came to an end in December 2022.

That wasn't quite the end of the story for InSight, though, as it is still being used for science to this day, albeit indirectly. Recently, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) caught a glimpse of InSight from orbit, capturing the lander's dusty surroundings and showing how even more dust had built up on it.

Read more