Frost at the Viking 2 landing site (super-resolution)

Filed under pretty pictures, amateur image processing, Mars, NASA Mars missions before 1996, weather and climate

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Frost at the Viking 2 landing site (super-resolution)

This image of frost on Mars has become iconic.� Unfortunately, it is tiny, because it was obtained using Viking's low resolution mode and there was no high resolution image taken along with it. This version of the image was processed using a super-resolution technique.

NASA / JPL / Ted Stryk

Using a different high resolution image and simply using the color as an overlay would not work, because the frost would be absent or the patterns wouldn't match.� Other image sets of the frost exist, but they have more serious problems with over/under exposure due to the high contrast of the scene and the limitations of the Viking imaging system. Therefore, I used super-resolution processing, a technique pioneered by Tim Parker of JPL, in order to get the best resolution I could out of the existing dataset.� The result is quite pleasing.�

Copyright holder: Ted Stryk

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder. Original image data dated on or about May 18, 1979