Pulling off images clicked by the Mars Color Camera onboard ISRO’s extended Mars Orbiter Mission, the space agency has come out with a neat new 3D rendering of a portion of the Martian terrain, which could easily be one of the closest looks space fanatics can get of the Martian surface.

This fly-through takes to hovering around Oudemans, Calydon Fossa, Louros Valles  Arima, Ophir and Perrotin features.

Valles Marineris is the largest canyon system about 4000 km long, 200 km wide and 7 km deep. This image also shows Noctis Labyrinthus at bottom left corner of the image. Fracture patterns at the center of Valles Marineris and northern portion of Noctis Labyrinthus are clearly seen. All of these are names, assigned by space agencies across the globe to craters and significant depressions discovered on Mars’ surface over time.

Images of Valles Marineris and adjoining regions of Mars taken by MCC on board MOM are used in generating the fly-through. The MCC image was captured on November 10, 2014 at an altitude of 16,972 km. The spatial resolution of image is 882 m.

ISRO says that the data was corrected by normalizing the radiometry with topographic effects. Subsequently, the image is draped over Planet Mars topography in the region of coverage mentioned above. Topography data has been smoothed for visual appeal.


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