Mars south pole and beyond

This sweeping view by ESA’s Mars Express extends from the planet’s south polar ice cap and across its cratered highlands to the Hellas Basin (top left) and beyond. Click here for an annotated image.

The image was acquired by the high-resolution stereo camera on ESA’s Mars Express on 25 February 2015. It is a ‘broom calibration’ image, acquired while the spacecraft performed a manoeuvre such that its camera pans over the surface far above the planet, at about 9 900 km.

The ground resolution is about 1 km per pixel at the closest point to the surface. The image was created using data from the nadir channel, the field of view of which is aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, and the colour channels of HRSC. These channels have been co-registered using ‘markers’ on the surface, such as a mountain or dark spot, to achieve a common geometry. That is, for each colour channel, these markers are overlain to produce the colour image. This process is not needed for ‘normal’ nadir observations because the geometry is known here, unlike in this broom observation.

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