ESA’s Labyrinth of the Night
ESA’s Mars Express has imaged the Noctis Labyrinthus region on Mars with their High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), called the “labyrinth of the night.” This area is located at 6.5 degrees south and 260 degrees east, with the Sun illuminating it from the north-west. The view was taken while in orbit 3155 of the Express, with about 16 m/pixel for its ground resolution of an area that is part of the Martian complex graben-system which was formed due to extensional tectonics.
This process all was part of the process of volcanism that was very intense and powerful in the Tharsis region. This led to a formation of a giant bulge in the area, which eventually resulted in tectonic stress that led to the surface crust to thin and form these structures—elongated, trench features which were surrounded by normal faults on a parallel basis. According to ESA, the photograph above shows the upper portion being hugely fractured.
With the nadir channel and three HRSC color channels, this sharpened image has been calculated from a perspective viewpoint of the digital terrain model from stereo channels. The one stereo channel and the nadir calculated the anaglyph image.
The HRSC has made history in planetary research. It is the first fully functional stereo camera who computer animations have allowed its images to turn and tilt, in order for it to appear as if it were moving over the Martian surface. But a long process is required to get the data back to Earth, for us to be able to see the picture above. Once the pictures are taken on space onboard the Mars Express, it is then transmitted to Australia, at ESA’s new Norcia Station—or to NASA’s Deep Space Network Station in Madrid.
Once the data is accumulated at these places, it goes to the European Space Operations Center (ESOC) at Darmstadt in Germany, where they are transmitted the Aerospace Research Establishment (DLR) in Germany. It is from this point we begin to see the picture above.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 6:51 pm and is filed under Public Relations, Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
