As the official mapping agency of Great Britain, the Ordnance Survey (OS) is no stranger to creating easy-to-use, geometrically-accurate representations of terrain, but its latest efforts are truly out of this world.
As BBC News and the Daily Mail reported on Monday, OS cartographer Chris Wesson reviewed open data originally published by NASA and used it to create a terrain map of Mars. One copy of the map was printed and given to British scientist Dr. Peter Grindrod as he helps plan the landing of the European ExoMars rover in 2019.
Credit: Ordnance Survey
In addition, the map of the Red Planet, which covers roughly 10 million square kilometers (3.8 million square miles, or about seven percent of its terrain). It has also been posted on the OS’s official Flickr account for all to see – just in case anyone happens to be planning a road-trip to Mars and want to make sure they can find their way around once they get there.
In all seriousness, Wesson explained to BBC News that he could picture an astronaut one day using either a physical or digital copy of the map while exploring Mars. The OS added that the exercise was an experiment to see if mapping could benefit future missions to other planets.
Features include Schiaperelli crater, Opportunity landing site
Wesson told BBC News that he made the map at Dr. Grindrod’s request, admitting that it was “a little hard at first to actually understand the data itself in terms of things like the elevation and the scale and so on. But actually the physical process was almost identical to what was used to make an Earth map, or any OS map.”
The Daily Mail noted that the map is at a scale of 1:4,000,000, meaning that every centimeter is equal to 2,485 miles (4,000 kilometers). It covers a total area of 2,282 by 1,690 miles (3,672 km by 2,721 km) of the planet’s surface – the region known as the Western Arabia Terra. Among its most prominent features are the Schiaperelli crater (as features in the movie The Martian) and the landing sites of both the Opportunity rover and the Mars Pathfinder missions.
The planet Mars has become the latest subject in our long line of iconic OS paper maps. The one-off map, created using NASA open data and made to a 1:4,000,000 scale, is made to see if our style of mapping has potential for future Mars missions. (Credit: Ordnance Survey)
“Becoming more familiar with space is something that interests us all,” OS director of products David Henderson told the newspaper, “and the opportunity to apply our innovative cartography and mapping tradecraft to a different planet was something we couldn’t resist.”
“Even though the principles are the same, the design and the aesthetics of an Earth map differ considerably,” added Wesson. “The cartographic style is something that is very different to your typical planetary map and is identifiable as an OS map. The key ingredients to this style are the soft color palette of the base combined with the traditional map features such as contours and grid lines, and the map sheet layout complete with legend.”
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
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