The first hiking maps of Mars
European Space Agency
February 12, 2007

Check out Emily's latest blog entry.

I was definitely on Emily's wavelength! 250m contour intervals on most of the maps!

Maybe for an expert like Climber, that's a walk in the park, but even a 20m contour can hide some pretty spooky slopes, at least for 1G hikers.

Am I correctly recalling that Nasa/USGS was producing topographic maps of the Martian surface at least as far back as the Viking missions?

I'm looking at one from 1976, based on Mariner data

As I thought. I can't wait to hear them announce the first mapping of hematite at Meridiani

I never saw a contoured one, but I do have several of the USGS airbrushed Mariner 9 maps circa 1973-74...beautiful things, used to look at them for hours (esp. Tharsis).

My recollection is that they do have contours. I should dig mine out if I can find them. It looks like this summary has that 1976 topo map listed:

http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/MapB...mars_small.html

I didn't notice this discussion at the time, so here goes...

USGS made topo maps from Mariner 9 and Viking data. Global maps were from very sparse and weak data - like atmospheric density estimated from occultations. Local details could be go from stereo images - very few in Mariner 9 data, lots in Viking. But stereo is no good globally for a big place like Mars (the orientation of the stereo model is not constrained), so topo was still poor for Viking.

Nevertheless, global maps at 1:25 million and 1:15M were compiled, and the 1:5M sheets had a topo version as well. For Viking, 1:2M topo was produced for some sheets of the 120-sheet series. Viking landing site maps included topo at 1:250K.

But only with MOLA did we get good topo globally. And we still lack it for the Moon.

Phil