Mars CTX Controlled Equatorial Mosaics File Listing

citation: Robbins, S. J., Kirchoff, M. R., and Hoover, R. H. (2023). Fully controlled 6 meters per pixel equatorial mosaic of Mars from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Context Camera images, version 1. Earth and Space Science, 10, e2022EA002443, URL: https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EA002443.

abstract: This product is a cartographically controlled mosaic of Mars Charts (MC) 08 through 23, covering 50.0 percent of Mars' surface, from -30 deg N to +30 deg N latitude and 0–360 deg E longitude. The images come from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's Context Camera (CTX), which has been returning 5–6 meters per pixel images of Mars since 2008. This product was produced using automated cartographic control network code that was then manually edited. It includes data through the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter CTX PDS release 56, with some regions containing data through release 57 or 58. The control network code incorporated all usable images in that release, and there were roughly 70,000 images that met our quality requirements. Those images cover 98.9 percent of the surface area of the region. The mosaic was produced by priority-ordering images in an automated method that emphasized Spring/Autumn images, images with an emission or slew angle closest to 0 deg, and images with the best pixel scale. The mosaic order was manually edited where severe discontinuities were observed due seasonal issues or when low signal-to-noise images were emphasized. The mosaic was further cosmetically corrected to produce the appearance of an approximately similarly illuminated product throughout. The final network has 2.4 million tie points, and 99.92 percent of them have residuals ≤1 pixel. RMS ground point uncertainty is 4.7 m in latitude, 9.3 m in longitude, and 180.1 m in radius.

use: This mosaic is available as tiled into 16 large quads using a positive 16bit bit range. We recommend a GIS application or other application capable of reading very large images needed for viewing images. Using a free download application like "wget" is recommended. Internally the quads were produced as cloud-optimized GeoTiffs (COGs) which means they are compressed with internal pyramids. Thus these files can be streamed to some GIS applications without download.