Martian Terrain Data
Laser altimetry data for the surface of the planet Mars has been made public by NASA. We want to develop a viewer for this data which will allow, for example, users to "fly over" the Martian terrain.
The JPG file is way too "lossy", so we copied the TIFF file from the NASA site and made a BMP copy. We analyzed the above color scale to develop an algorithm to convert color to altitude, and converted these to VRML files.
We intend to make the VRML files themselves available here soon; typically, however, these files are very large and require significant download times and a VRML browser. We have included some screen shots from some of our VRMLs to illustrate the idea. We would also like to combine the corresponding colors from the above true color image instead of the current uniform red.
The following is a screen shot from a C++ program developed with MFC which takes the above true color image of Mars and maps the pixels onto a sphere which may then be rotated arbitrarily about its center. The "Rotate" menu item has drop-down items which allow rotations (of 10 degrees) about any of the three axes, either in a positive or negative sense. The "Spin" function rotates the sphere about the current screen y-axis 36 times in 10-degree increments.
