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.

To download released raw images and DTMs of the region in GIS-ready formats, follow this link to the mapserver.

Images: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

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Where expressly stated, images are licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO) licence. The user is allowed to reproduce, distribute, adapt, translate and publicly perform it, without explicit permission, provided that the content is accompanied by an acknowledgement that the source is credited as 'ESA/DLR/FU Berlin', a direct link to the licence text is provided and that it is clearly indicated if changes were made to the original content. Adaptation / translation / derivatives must be distributed under the same licence terms as this publication.

The High Resolution Stereo Camera was developed at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and built in collaboration with partners in industry (EADS Astrium, Lewicki Microelectronic GmbH and Jena-Optronik GmbH). The science team, which is headed by Principal Investigator (PI) Dr. Thomas Roatsch (DLR Berlin-Adlershof), consists of 52 co-investigators from 34 institutions and 11 countries. The camera is operated by the DLR Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin-Adlershof.