The topography of an angel on Mars
The topography of an angel on Mars
DLR’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, with its nine sensors arranged across the north-south flight direction, records the surface of Mars at different angles and in four colour channels. From the four stereo channels and the nadir channel, which is directed perpendicular to the surface of Mars, scientists at the DLR Institute of Planetary Research and the Freie Universität Berlin compute digital terrain models, which assign elevation information to each pixel. The colour scale in the upper right corner shows the differences in altitude in the region. Here, the outlines of the ‘angel on Mars’ with its outstretched ‘wings’ stand out through the colour coding.
