Topographic map of the surroundings of Jezero Crater

DLR’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) orbits Mars on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft. Its nine sensors, arranged at right angles to the north-south flight direction, record the surface of Mars from different angles and in four colour channels. From the four inclined stereo channels and the nadir channel, which is directed perpendicular to the surface of Mars, scientists at the Freie Universität Berlin an the DLR Institute of Planetary Research compute digital terrain models, which assign elevation information to each pixel. The height difference in this area of 1.5 million square kilometres (see key at bottom right), from the lowest point in Isidis Planitia to the highest crater rim in Terra Sabaea, is over 6800 metres – the floor of Jezero Crater lies at an elevation of approximately minus 2600 metres. The elevation data in this image is referenced to the Mars Areoid, a notional plane of equal gravitational attraction, analogous to sea level on Earth. The high resolution of the data processed for this image allows for greater enlargement of the images for a closer look at individual details of the landscape.