ISRO Mars Orbiter Mission Mars Colour Camera data

Presented by The Planetary Society

Emily Lakdawalla Last updated 29 September 2017

The Mars Colour Camera (MCC) aboard Mars Orbiter Mission takes natural color images that are 2048 pixels square. While it is not capable of resolutions as high as other orbiters' science cameras, its wide field of view and color sensor make it excellent for global and regional context imaging.

ISRO shares data from Mars Orbiter mission in yearly data releases to the Mars Orbiter Mission ISRO Science Data Archive hosted at the Indian Space Science Data Centre (ISSDC). Read the ISRO data release statement here, and read the full terms and conditions here.

To date, ISRO has released data acquired through 23 September 2016. There are currently 827 MCC images available, representing 747 unique observations (some observations were transmitted to Earth more than once, through different ground stations). The user interface at ISSDC is not particularly accessible, so Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society has undertaken a project to make the data more widely available through this web page. Read more about the project, and analysis of the data set, here.

The Data

Browse the data through the links below. All images must be credited to ISRO/ISSDC. Where possible, The Planetary Society requests acknowledgment for making the data accessible. These data are for educational/scientific use only, not commercial use.

Here is a table of metadata for the images, collected from the detached text headers. For figuring out image scales, I recommend this tool.

Complete year 1 data set in order of acquisition

Complete year 2 data set in order of acquisition

Full-globe views sorted by longitude

Nearly global views (truncated on at least one side) sorted by longitude

Observations covering wide regions on Mars sorted by longitude

High-resolution observations and mosaics sorted by longitude

Some users may be interested in these MOM SPICE kernels (Warning!!! 1.6 GB)

More About the Mission and Instrument

The following description of the instrument and data set is contained in the labels of all of the image files:

Mars Colour Camera (MCC) is a Bayer Array RGB camera operating in the visible range (0.4-0.7) is a medium resolution camera flown on the Mars Orbiter Mission. It captures images of topography of Martian surface. It observes and helps in furthering our understanding of events like dust storms, dust devils etc. Moving in an elliptical orbit of 372km x 80000km around mars, the camera produces visible images of Mars and its environs. The highly elliptical orbit chosen for the Mars mission allow imaging of localized scenes at high spatial resolution as well as providing a synoptic view of the full globe. from apogee position of the orbit. This instrument is from Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad, India Scientific Objective :- To map various morphological features on Mars with varying resolution and scales using the unique elliptical orbit. To map the geological setting around sites of Methane emission source. To provide context information for other science payloads. Sensor Configuration :- MCC uses a multi-element lens assembly and a 2Kx2K area array detector with RGB Bayer pattern to take images. The f/4 lens has a focal length of 105mm with a circularly symmetric field of view of plusminus4.4deg. The detector has 2048 x 2048 elements on a pixel pitch of 5.5 microns. Salient Features:- Spacecraft Altitude (km) - 372x80000 Resolution (m) - 19.5@Periareion Frame Size (km) - 40x40@Periareion (Full Mars disc from 63000km Apoareion) Spectral region (micrometer) - 0.4-0.7 Frame rate - 1s (frame selection at 1s, 8s or 15s period by BDH through ground commanding) Exposure time (ms) - Total 16 ground programmable exposures ranging from 34 ms to 490 ms Data volume/frame (Mb)- 40 System MTF@46 LP/mm ()-greater than 15 SNR @9. Near Saturation - greater than 50

Following are a few more resources:

These pages are maintained by Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society. To support Emily's work, please donate to The Planetary Society.

We acknowledge the use of data from the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), first interplanetary mission of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), archived at the Indian Space Science Data Centre (ISSDC)