VOLUME 75, NUMBER 9
PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE
SENSING
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR PHOTOGRAMMETRY
AND REMOTE SENSING
The cover page of this issue shows a shaded relief perspective view with color-coded heights generated from a Mars digital terrain
model of the Mawrth Vallis area. The area is located at the
southern border of the northern lowlands of the planet, and has
been selected as one of the fi nal four candidate landing sites for
NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover mission. The area
is thought to represent an ancient aqueous geological environment
on early Mars that may have been suitable for life.
The terrain model has been produced from stereo data of the
High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) onboard ESA’s Mars Express
mission. HRSC is the fi rst sensor system with built-in stereo
capabilities that has been included in a planetary orbiter mission.
The model has been derived from 19 adjacent imaging tracks by
automated procedures that include standardized quality checks,
but no interactive measurements or data editing procedures (see
peer-reviewed article in this issue for details on HRSC and related
processing methodology). The raster model has a resolution of
50 m/pxl and covers a total area of about 0.8 million km2. Mapping
products of this type will be important tools for defi ning the
regional context of the local fi ndings achieved by the rover mission.
The area shown is about 100 km wide in the foreground, about 450 km wide in the background.
North is to the left, vertical exaggeration is by factor 4. The terrain model has been produced at the
Institute of Planetary Research of the German Aerospace Center (DLR; www.dlr.de, contact: Klaus.Gwinner@dlr.de).
The extent of banana plantations was mapped using panchromatic
and multispectral SPOT-5 imagery and object-oriented
segmentation and classification in Definiens Professional 5.
The methodology and procedures for the derivation of highresolution
DTMs from data of the Mars Express High Resolution
Stereo Camera (HRSC) by the experiment team, and report
on related processing test series and quality assessment.