An elaborate digital map is offering an extraordinary rendering of the Mars landscape. With the help of NASA open data, Ordnance Survey, the national mapping agency of the UK, has surveyed a portion of the Red Planet’s surface for the creation of a one-off paper and digital map.

Produced at a scale of 1 to 4 million, the 2,282-by-1,691-mile Mars map is part of an OS initiative to assess potential use of its mapping expertise for the Red Planet missions in future.

In a press release, OS Director of Products David Henderson described that becoming more accustomed to space is something that is quite interesting for all and that chance of applying their innovative cartography and mapping tradecraft to another planet was something they couldn’t resist.

Henderson said, “We were asked to map an area of Mars in an OS style because our maps are easy to understand and present compelling visualization, and because of this we can envisage their usefulness in planning missions and for presenting information about missions to public”.

Created in 1971 for military purposes, OS possesses 500 million exclusive geographic features of Great Britain in the database. Previous the agency made a map outside of Britain’s shores in mid-1990s.

OS Cartographic Design Consultant Chris Wesson, designer of the map, said that they have set out from the very beginning to treat the Red Planet data in the same manner as they would treat OS GB data or any other Earth-based geography.

Wesson added that the cartographic style is something that is quite distinct to typical planetary map and can be identified as an OS map. He mentioned that the main ingredients to this style include the base’s soft color palette mixed with the traditional map features like contours and grid lines and the map sheet layout ends up with legend.