This contour map was created from the MOLA data and shows the Opportunity landing site area. Up is North, the contours are at 10 meter intervals. The white cross marks the center of the landing ellipse. You can find a larger scale map here.

Datasets for both the Mars rover landing sites are now available for the Mars3D Viewer software, you can download them from here.

I used the Mars Explorer software to drive around the Gusev crater landing site. According to the MOLA data the highest point of the nearby hills is 62 metres above the landing site. It is quite likely that MGS did not pass directly over the highest point so the hills are probably somewhat higher than that. A NASA press conference recently suggested they are 100m high.

I've updated the contour map of the Spirit landing site and adjusted my estimate of the landing location marked with the white cross. The largest hills in the pan cam image can be seen on the map about 2km south east, they are 50m high.

Congratulations to NASA on the successful landing of Spirit. This contour map was created from the MOLA data and shows the landing site area. Up is North, the contours are at 5 meter intervals. The red mark shows the location of the craters captured in this descent image.

The solid black areas are craters where the contour lines are packed tightly together. There are a number of artifacts because the image was created at a resolution that resulted in heavy interpolation in some places.

This page explains how NASA will locate the MER's.

Sandro Batista kindly sent me a GUI front end for the Gravity 3D software. It allows you to change the parameters without having to use notepad. I have added his loader to the download, you can find the updated version here. Many thanks Sandro.

I've added some images which show what MER-A may see when it lands early next year. They were created using the Mars Explorer software and the MOLA data. You can see them here.

I have created some images and a contour map of the MER landing sites, you can find them here.

I will soon be adding some views from the MER-A landing site created using the Mars Explorer software. They will simulate what the rover should see from the surface when it lands in January 2004.

Four posters feauturing topographic globes of Mars are available from the shop. Each poster was created using images with a resolution of 8000x6000 pixels, the models used to render the images consisted of 200 million polygons. Each poster image took 8 hours to render.

This new image shows two galaxies colliding, each galaxy contains 100 million stars. The image was created by compositing several runs of a new version of Gravity3D. To simulate that number of stars in one run would require 6 Gb of ram. I used software floating point buffers and an exposure function to prevent image burn out. I also added some background stars and applied a bloom flare effect to the final image. More images here.

Posters of some of the images in the gallery will be available for purchase in 1-3 weeks time.

I've added a new 200m contour map of Olympus Mons to the maps page.

The Gravity3D software won the visualisation/simulation category at the LEAF(London Effects and Animation Festival) awards.

I have updated the Gravity software. It now takes advantage of SSE on Athlon CPUs, previously it only used SSE on Intel CPUs. The performance gain is significant. I have also fixed the bug where sometimes the HUD didn't display. The readme file in the download has more information on the changes.

Earlier this week my email inbox became corrupted after I tried to compact it so I lost all my e-mails. If you sent me an e-mail in the last week or so and haven't had a reply please re-send it. My e-mail inbox is just about the only thing I didn't have a backup of.....typical.

I've added rocks and a better surface texture to Mars Explorer. I haven't updated the demo yet but here's some screenshots. They were taken using the Melas Chasma map and a visibility of 30km. In the next version there will also be an overhead map to aid navigation.

I've updated Mars Explorer with a new map, Melas Chasma. Among the new features is variable view distance. The software defaults to a view distance of 200km but you can change it to a more realisitic 30km. I've improved the lens flare and added sun glare. I've also improved the ground detail and added surface curvature. In addition performance should be significantly better.

From what I can tell the average viewable distance on Mars is 30km.I'm interested in finding out what the maximum viewable distance on a good day could be. if anyone has information on this please let me know.

I will be releasing a new map for Mars Explorer soon. It covers the area surrounding the Melas Chasma MER landing site. Here's some screen shots 1 2 3. I based the surface colour on this image from one of the Viking landers. I've gone with a blue sky partly because it looks nice but also because there is some evidence to suggest that the Martian sky could be blue.

Here's a contour map of the Melas Chasma landing site for the Mars Exploration Rover (277->287E,-4->-14N). The landing ellipse is highlighted in white. The map was created using my MOLA processing software and all the MOLA data. You can read more about the proposed MER landing sites here.

I updated the Gravity3D software again a few days ago.