Hi OPM Community,
I’m currently trying to create shaded renders of the surface of mars, and to do that I need map tiles containing elevation data. I came across the basemaps which included hillshaded and color gradient version of the MOLA DEM, but no api for the raw DEM.
Is there any way to extract elevation information from the provided map tiles, or is there some api that serves the raw DEM. I’ve been looking for a while as I really don’t want to download the full 11gb .tif file provided by NASA.
I guess I would start with the 2 GB MOLA version:
This global mosaic is essentially a merge of the original MOLA Team released tiles (which can also be used, you will want the “megt*” or topography tiles). GDAL or QGIS would need to load the *.lbl (with the *.img next to it locally):
https://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/mgs/mgs-m-mola-5-megdr-l3-v1/mgsl_300x/meg128/
- note this merged version tries to cover the 88-90 latitude gap with whatever we could find.
For WMS services, we do have a cloud-optimized GeoTIFF (COG) of that:
https://asc-pds-services.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wms_basemaps3/Mars/MOLA/mola128_mola64_merge_90Nto90S_SimpleC_clon0_cog.tif (~2GB).
- This COG version can be dropped into QGIS without downloading (tip: load raster, set https option box, copy the https address in).
This COG version can also be accessed by GDAL also using /VSIS3. GDAL (gdal_translate, gdalwarp) can help derive hillshade, map project, clip, …).
Lastly, there is a “hillshade” COG version of the hybrid MOLA/HRSC merge. But we have not made a COG version of the original elevation DEM data. linked file: Mars_HRSC_MOLA_BlendShade_Global_200mp_v2_cog.tif