If studying Mars is an endurance race, then NASA’s Odyssey spacecraft is definitely in the lead! Since arriving at Mars on October 24th, 2001, it has completed over 73,000 orbits of the Red Planet, returned over 1.5 terabytes of science data, and relayed images from four different surface missions (Spirit, Opportunity, Phoenix and Curiosity).

During that time, the THEMIS (THermal EMission Imaging System) camera onboard Odyssey has collected over 230,000 infrared images of the surface at a resolution of 100 meters per pixel. As part of my PhD research, I sorted through all those images and used the best 24,000 images to create a global daytime infrared mosaic of the entire Martian surface, which was released in 2017.

However, while our Mars science colleagues found the map very useful, we quickly found that it was difficult to use this global map for education and public outreach activities, especially with children. In a world where you can pull up Google Maps, zoom in on your house and see your pixelated-self mowing your lawn, using a computer screen to zoom in on features that are only the size of a football field can seem almost…anti-climactic, even when it’s on Mars.

So, to better communicate the true scale of this new global map of Mars, we decided to colorize it using MOLA (Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter) elevation data and then print the entire map at near-photo quality (~200 pixels per inch). The resulting map is 47.5 feet by 95 feet…approximately the size of a basketball court!