CTX Gale Crater Basemap

Gale Crater is one of the best-known sites on the Martian surface. It is located at 5.3°S, 222.3°W (137.7°E), and is ~ 155 km in diameter. It has become a target of particular interest because of the large mound of stratified material that occupies the crater entrance (~5000 m). Gale Crater is the landing site of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover Curiosity, which landed on the Martian surface on August 5, 2012 (NASA JPL, 2017). This work aims to provide a basemap that will serve as a reference map on which we can overlay data from other layers such as mineralogy and visualize geographic and geomorphological information. We used calibrated radiometric data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) Context Camera (CTX) which is currently orbiting Mars and acquiring grey-scale images at a scale of 6 m/pixel over a 30-km-wide swath (Malin et al. in Journal of Geophysical Research: 112-E5, 2007), to generate a 6 m/pixel resolution mosaic of the entire crater, which will serve as the basemap for our studies of this site. The processing was done with ArcMap 10.6 and Qgis 3.28.0 software. The wide coverage and resolution of the CTX make it a good tool for geomorphological mapping of the surrounding units. The crater comprises sedimentary deposits, a bowl-shaped depression, and a central mountain (Blake et al. in Science 341-6153, 2013). The crater rim is quite degraded but still clearly identifiable, and the surrounding terrain has a bumpy, mantled appearance (Le Deit et al. in Journal of Geophysical Research 118–12, 2013), visible on the CTX mosaic. The generated basemap provides the geomorphic context for the various investigations we are conducting to study the Martian surface, in particular Gale Crater.