4 October 2011

Mars Art: Mars Express View of the South Pole

Posted by Ryan Anderson

I came across this image this morning and immediately thought it deserved to be shared. It shows the edge of the south polar ice cap in a location called Ulyxes Rupes. The ice cap is the dark, rounded terrain on the left and there is a small outlier of ice in the crater in the upper right. The great thing about this image is that it was acquired using the High Resolution Stereo Camera, which also returns an elevation map of the same scene. The shaded colorized altitude map looks like some abstract watercolor to my eye…

For more info about the image, head over to the press release on the ESA site. I wish HRSC was more open with its data, because it takes beautiful images that are also very scientifically useful!