The OS has always been the trusted mainstay of mapping and, in true pioneering spirit, it is looking outward into the wider universe, producing a 1:4,000,000 scale map of the surface of Mars, created from the open data provided by NASA.

Their intention, apparently, was “to see if our style of mapping has potential for future Mars missions”.

Presumably it will be required reading for the intrepid folk of the Mars One expeditions that plan to set up permanent colonies on the Red Planet from the late 2020s. So they now have a map – all they need is a compass.

The map is a thing of beauty in its own right. OS posted it on its Flickr account, commenting that this is the first time it has used its state-of-the-art cartography technology to map another world.

Website biztekmojo.com reports Chris Wesson, the OS cartographer who created the map, as saying that the data was initially difficult to interpret, to understand elevation and scale, but fortunately for those future colonists they managed it.

The team mapped about 3,672×2,721km – or about 7% of the Martian surface, and Wesson is reported to have said:

There’s actually quite a lot of information in the data. You can zoom in and see rocky crops, which areas are really uneven, which are generally flat, and you can work out where all of the massive craters are. My biggest task was to try and emphasise the depth of the craters without losing the detail of what at first appear to be flatter areas of land, but aren’t at all.”

The Mars map was created at the request of Peter Grindrod, a British scientist at Birkbeck, University of London, who is involved in a European Space Agency plan to land an ExoMars rover on the planet in 2019. “He was working on an idea of whether he could take a typical Mars map and make it look like the kind of map OS is known for,” said Wesson.

Unfortunately the gadget we all rely on when we go out with our OS map – the compass – won’t work on Mars because the planet doesn’t have strong directional magnetic fields, so how will astronauts and settlers navigate?

According to kottke.org:

Four US Martian rovers have used wheel odometers that account for slippage to calculate distance travelled” … and “gyroscopes (in the form of an inertial measurement units) to determine heading and pitch/roll information.”

But I don’t doubt there’s a Gadget Master out there somewhere trying to come up with a single-device solution. Let me know if you hear anything!