Surface of Mars revealed in unprecedented detail

The surface of Mars – including the location of Beagle-2 – has been shown in unprecedented detail by scientists using a revolutionary image stacking and matching technique.

The technique made use of images supplied by scientists from our University.

Exciting pictures of the Beagle-2 lander, the ancient lakebeds discovered by NASA’s Curiosity rover, NASA’s MER-A rover tracks and Home Plate’s rocks have been released by University College London researchers who stacked and matched images taken from orbit, to reveal objects at a resolution up to five times greater than previously achieved.

A paper describing the technique, called Super-Resolution Restoration (SRR), was published in Planetary and Space Science in February but has only recently been used to focus on specific objects on Mars. The technique could be used to search for other artefacts from past failed landings as well as identify safe landing locations for future rover missions. It will also allow scientists to explore vastly more terrain than is possible with a single rover.

The UCL team applied SRR to stacks of between four and eight 25cm images of the Martian surface taken using the NASA HiRISE camera to achieve the 5cm target resolution. These included some of the latest HiRISE images of the Beagle-2 location proposed by University of Leicester and other Beagle 2 team colleagues and were kindly provided by Professor John Bridges from the University of Leicester.

The Leicester team will use this technique for the ExoMars Rover landing site selection and characterisation, due for launch between 2018 and 2020.   

The team’s ‘super-resolution’ zoomed-in image of the Beagle-2 location proposed by Professor Mark Sims and colleagues at our University provides strong supporting evidence that this is the site of the lander.