A global colour mosaic of Mars from high altitude observations

Colour images of Mars are strongly affected by the planet’s varying atmospheric scattering such that colour shifts between images may be comparable in magnitude to the actual surface colour variation within an image. The processing of this product addresses this problem by making use only of relative colour information within single images, used iteratively to derive a global colour model, offering absolute colour brightness estimates at all locations (Michael et al, in review). The current processing iteration uses around 90 images with pixel scales greater than 200 m, selected for minimal influence of atmospheric dust while clipping out any significant areas of cloud, and processed to 2 km/pixel. There remain a small number of coverage gaps which we hope to fill during the 2023-2026 mission extension.