Celestia Forums

I have but up three 3 gig .ppm files of Mars Malin data on my web server.

http://exp.arc.nasa.gov/downloads/BigMarsPPM/

they are:

moc.ppm (mars observer camera)
mola.ppm (unshaded laser altimeter)
molashaded.ppm (shaded mola)


Any of you power users are welcome to make textures from these. These are all greyscale, but the mola.ppm is capable of making the most accurate bump/normal map imagineable. The MOC data goes from 88 to -88. It should be possible to assign color values. I would sugggest using Netpbm or some such to break up the image into manageable chunks.
I think this would make a super accurate alternative texture for Mars - one that could legitemately be used for research purposes.

Like I mentioned these are 3 gigabyte files so don't try to download them over a telephone modem.

Oh great, this should mean some fantasticly large and detailed single and virtual textures to come.

looking forward to some great Mars textures...

Hi Alan,
Is your topography map made from the mola128 data set? Or is it somehow a higher resolution?
I have already made a 64k normal map VT set from mola128 data. The whole VT folder weighs in at 10GB in u888 format.
Here's a pic of Olympus Mons made with the a 16k flat mars texture from Mario at SpaceGraphics(recoloured a little) and the 64k normal map...




http://www.shatters.net/albums/album03/Olympus_sumbit.avi
The above link is to a 350kb avi(DivX 5) of the sumbit of Olympus Mons going through a full day.

There are some more pics in my gallery(which is a bit of a mess at the moment) on the last two pages.

The source of the Data is Tim Sandstrom of NASA Ames - he is running a 7 by 7 linux cluster (49 Screens) that can show 140,000 by 140,000 pixels at one time. Tim did the mosaiking so the base images ar 40k by 20k pixiels I am pretty sure the Mola set is 64k data BUT it is unshaded so pretty valuable. I haven't worked with the MOC data yet - so I am unsure exactly how it was made. But it should be the best data available for making an alternate texture - combined with the MOLA for a normal map

---OOH LA LA!!!!


I just don't have the time and people resources to devote to doing this now - so I am hoping the Celestia community can help me out.

BTW I am more than willing to put some of the alternate textures derived up for public use.

Alan,

7 by 7 linux cluster (49 Screens) that can show 140,000 by 140,000 pixels at one time

Where on earth did he find screens that can individually display 20,000 x 20,000 pixels?

On another note, the files aren't downloading.

-Walton