Catch a Star 2002

This thermal infrared image was acquired by Mars Odyssey's thermal emission imaging system on October 30, 2001, as the spacecraft orbited Mars on its ninth revolution around the planet. The image was taken as part of the calibration and testing process of the camera system. 

This image shows the temperature of Mars in one of the 10 thermal infrared filters. The spacecraft was approximately 22,000 kilometers (about 13,600 miles) above the planet looking down toward the south pole of Mars when this image was acquired.

It is late spring in the martian southern hemisphere. The extremely cold, circular feature shown in blue is the martian south polar carbon dioxide ice cap at a temperature of about -120 °C (-184 ° F). The cap is more than 900 kilometers (540 miles) in diameter at this time and will continue to shrink as summer progresses. Clouds of cooler air blowing off the cap can be seen in orange extending across the image to the left of the cap.

The cold region in the lower right portion of the image shows the nighttime temperatures of Mars, demonstrating the "night-vision" capability of the camera system to observe Mars even when the surface is in darkness. The warmest regions occur near local noontime. The ring of mountains surrounding the 900-kilometer (540-mile) diameter impact basin Argyre can be seen in the early afternoon in the upper portion of the image. The thin blue crescent along the upper limb of the planet is the martian atmosphere. This image covers a length of over 6,500 kilometers (3,900 miles) spanning the planet from limb to limb, with a resolution of approximately 5.5 kilometers per pixel (3.4 miles per pixel), or picture elements, at the point directly beneath the spacecraft. The Odyssey's infrared camera is planned to have a resolution of 100 meters per pixel (about 300 feet per pixel) from its mapping orbit.JPL manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The thermal emission imaging system was developed at Arizona State University, Tempe with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote Sensing, Santa Barbara, Calif. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, Colo., is the prime contractor for the project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

These two views of Mars are derived from the MGS Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) measurements of global broadband (0.3 - ~3.0 microns) visible and near-infrared reflectance, also known as albedo. The range of colors are in dimensionless units. The values are the ratio of the amount of electromagnetic energy reflected by the surface to the amount of energy incident upon it from the sun (larger values are brighter surfaces).

The radial magnetic field measured is color coded on a global perspective view that shows measurements derived from spacecraft tracks below 200 km overlain on a monochrome shaded relief map of the topography.

This image shows especially strong Martian magnetic fields in the southern highlands near the Terra Cimmeria and Terra Sirenum regions, centered around 180 degrees longitude from the equator to the pole. It is where magnetic stripes possibly resulting from crustal movement are most prominent. The bands are oriented approximately east - west and are about 100 miles wide and 600 miles long, although the longest band stretches more than 1200 miles.

The false blue and red colors represent invisible magnetic fields in the Martian crust that point in opposite directions. The magnetic fields appear to be organized in bands, with adjacent bands pointing in opposite directions, giving these stripes a striking similarity to patterns seen in the Earth's crust at the mid-oceanic ridges.

This is a vertical gravity map of Mars color-coded in mgals based on radio tracking. Note correlations and lack of correlations with the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) global topography

These maps are global false-color topographic views of Mars at different orientations from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA). The maps are orthographic projections that contain over 200,000,000 points and about 5,000,000 altimetric crossovers. The spatial resolution is about 15 kilometers at the equator and less at higher latitudes. The vertical accuracy is less than 5 meters. The right hand image view features the Hellas impact basin (in purple, with red annulus of high standing material). The left hand features the Tharsis topographic rise (in red and white). Note also the subtle textures associated with resurfacing of the northern hemisphere lowlands in the vicinity of the Utopia impact basin. These data were compiled by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) Team led by David Smith at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.

Mars

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