Author Topic: Feast your eyes on this new batch of spectacular photos of Mars (Read 373 times)

Buster's Uncle · « **on:** October 10, 2016, 04:36:49 pm »

Feast your eyes on this new batch of spectacular photos of Mars
The Verge
By Loren Grush on October 9, 2016 12:00 pm

Syrtis Major and Hellas (ISRO/ISSDC/Emily Lakdawalla)

Thanks to the Indian Space Research Organization and a little help from the Planetary Society, we just got a new batch of spectacular photos of the Red Planet. The images come from the Mars Orbiter, a spacecraft launched by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) in 2013. The Mars Orbiter successfully inserted itself into Mars orbit on September 24th, 2014, making ISRO the fourth space agency ever to put a spacecraft into orbit around the Red Planet. Since then, the spacecraft has been gathering images of the Martian surface, as well as studying the planet’s atmosphere and all the nearby space particles.

ISRO released the first year’s worth of data from the Mars Orbiter on September 17th, which you can access here. But as an added bonus, Emily Lakdawalla, senior editor of the Planetary Society, recently played around with some of those raw data images to create even more beautiful views of our planetary neighbor. Thanks to some color-correction and a few other editing tweaks, Lakdawalla enhanced the images to create some stunning pictures, ranging from global views of the planet to close-ups of the diverse terrain on its surface.

Check out the fruit of Lakdawalla's work below, and look out for a few appearances from Mars’ crazy moon Phobos.

Tharsis Montes and Valles Marineris (ISRO/ISSDC/Emily Lakdawalla)

A view of Mars, containing the landing sites for Viking 1, Mars Pathfinder, Opportunity, and Schiaparelli. The future ExoMars lander site is also contained in this image. (ISRO/ISSDC/Emily Lakdawalla)