part of Valles Marineris merged with a coarse-grid planet Mars. Most of the
planet has 2 data points per degree of latitude and longitude, but the Park
has 128 data points per degree. That is the finest topo detailing available
from MGS MOLA for Valles Marineris.
I am naming the park: Don. Edwards Park. It is ten times the area of
Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona.
The zip file is 9.7 megabytes. When unzipped it has a .3ds model of Mars
that is 12.3 megabytes. It also has a solarsys.ssc file and jpeg images
like these : Notice in the one image shown below, that the distance is
2.2 kilometers below the rim!
http://www.reliefglobe.com/marsParkb.jpg
http://www.reliefglobe.com/marsParkc.jpg
http://www.reliefglobe.com/marsParkd.jpg
http://www.reliefglobe.com/marsParke.jpg
http://www.reliefglobe.com/marsParkf.jpg
http://www.reliefglobe.com/marsParkg.jpg
http://www.reliefglobe.com/marsParkh.jpg
http://www.reliefglobe.com/marsParki.jpg
http://www.reliefglobe.com/marsParkj.jpg
http://www.reliefglobe.com/marsParkk.jpg
http://www.reliefglobe.com/marsParkl.jpg
http://www.reliefglobe.com/marsParkm.jpg
http://www.reliefglobe.com/marsParkn.jpg
http://www.reliefglobe.com/marsParko.jpg
http://www.reliefglobe.com/marsParkp.jpg
http://www.reliefglobe.com/marsParkq.jpg
http://www.reliefglobe.com/marsParka.jpg
To get the file, go to my ftp website by using the first link on this page,
http://www.reliefglobe.com/video.html
and then going down into the bonsai directory to get the file called:
mars_park.zip
Unzip into your extras/Addons directory. Then in Celestia, use the
Navigation menu and solarsystem browser to go to the Mars_1x_park
planet. Then you can fly into the park below the rim of the grandest
canyon. Travel up the valley and watch a sunrise as the first light
hits the rim. The park has 4000 times as much area detailing as the
rest of Mars. This is an experiment, without textures enabled. Maybe
textures will be enabled on a future version. This is a demonstration of
a reason to use 3D meshes instead of perfect spheres for planets. You
can land in a valley and see the jagged terrain in front of the horizon.
The park is 2 degrees tall and 4 degrees long (74 miles by 148 miles).
The boundaries of the Park are as follows :
North : 7.5 degrees south latitude
South : 9.5 degrees south latitude
East : 280 degrees east longitude
West : 276 degrees east longitude
Within the boundaries, data points are 1519 feet apart.
Outside the park, data points are 37 miles apart. The coarse data was
ramped down 20 miles below the fine data in the park in a half degree ramp.
That is so coarse data in the park cannot be seen from above the
planet's surface. But it can be seen from below the park. This
ramping is an experimental technique to merge hi res and lo res meshes
easily. By ramping the coarse data down, the computer software can keep
the same algorithms as before, just with one "if" statement added to
ramp coarse data under the fine data.
