Beagle-2 landing site. Credit: Yu Tao and Jan-Peter Muller, UCL
The surface of Mars – including the location of Beagle-2 – has been shown in unprecedented detail by UCL scientists using a revolutionary image stacking and matching technique. 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 the UCL researchers who stacked and matched images taken from orbit, to reveal objects at a resolution up to 5X greater than previously achieved.
Called Super-Resolution Restoration (SRR) it 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.
Prof Jan-Peter Muller from UCL Mullard Space Science Lab, said: “We now have the equivalent of drone-eye vision anywhere on the surface of Mars where there are enough clear repeat pictures. It allows us to see objects in much sharper focus from orbit than ever before and the picture quality is comparable to that obtained from landers.
For cameras orbiting Earth and Mars, resolution limit today is around 25cm. By stacking and matching pictures of the same area taken from different angles, SRR allows objects as small as 5cm to be seen from the same 25cm telescope. For Mars, where the surface usually takes decades to millions of years to change, these images can be captured over a period of 10yrs and still achieve a high resolution. For Earth, the atmosphere is much more turbulent so images for each stack have to be obtained in a matter of seconds.
The UCL team applied SRR to stacks of between 4 and 8 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 landing area that were kindly provided by Prof John Bridges from the University of Leicester.
“Using novel machine vision methods, information from lower resolution images can be extracted to estimate the best possible true scene. This technique has huge potential to improve our knowledge of a planet’s surface from multiple remotely sensed images. In the future, we will be able to recreate rover-scale images anywhere on the surface of Mars and other planets from repeat image stacks” said Mr Yu Tao, Research Associate at UCL .The team’s ‘super-resolution’ zoomed-in image of the Beagle-2 location provides strong supporting evidence that this is the site of the lander. The scientists plan on exploring other areas of Mars using the technique to see what else they find. http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0416/260416-Mars-images
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