Colored, shaded relief of the entire planet, derived from the Murray Lab 5 m CTX global mosaic — the same tiles that stream into Google Earth, here in the browser. No people to count on this one. Yet. How this map was made.
About. Global colored relief of Mars rendered from a 7 m-resolution terrain model (method), built on the Bruce Murray Lab 5 m CTX global mosaic. Imagery: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems; mosaic: Caltech Murray Lab; terrain & render: Casey Handmer. The streamed pyramid shown here resolves ~7 m/px at full zoom. For the Google Earth version, download the KML. The ≋ button floods the place: Casey's terraformed Mars render — seas, crater lakes, vegetation, and polar ice over the same terrain, at ~14 m/px.
Are there hot springs on Mars? Mars Odyssey's THEMIS camera was built, in part, to catch the pre-dawn infrared glow of a hydrothermal vent. Nobody had ever run the full search. This one did: every nighttime image THEMIS has taken in 23 years, reduced to one question — how small a warm spring could have hidden in all that data, and did any? The search worked out exactly how faint a source it could have caught, then looked. The sky comes back empty. No active geothermal springs anywhere the instrument could see, and now there's a number on how sure we can be.
The Viking tapes, decoded. In 1976 the Viking landers baked martian soil and ran the vapor through a mass spectrometer. The raw output then sat on a set of undocumented binary tapes for nearly fifty years. Here they are — decoded, verified, and calibrated from scratch. The chlorobenzene that Guzman et al. reported in 2018 falls straight back out of the digital record, and the strongest water peak says the soil's hydrogen carries about three times the deuterium of Earth's oceans. Mars has been leaking its water to space for billions of years. The isotopes kept the receipt.