NASA Mars Odyssey THEMIS Image: DCS Color near Mare Cimmerium

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Context image credit: NASA/Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) Team
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This image shows two representations of the same infra-red image covering

an area near Mare Cimmerium. On the left is a grayscale image showing

surface temperature, and on the right is a false-color composite made

from 3 individual THEMIS bands. The false-color image is colorized

using a technique called decorrelation stretch (DCS), which emphasizes

the spectral differences between the bands to highlight compositional

variations.

This area contains a mixture of basaltic materials (magenta/purple) and dust (green/blue). Faint blue areas may be due to some thin water ice clouds. The different compositional units are sometimes correlated with crater floors and other surface features, but they are often not tied to valleys, lava flows, etc… indicating that the surface materials could be mobile (dust and sand).

[Source: ASU THEMIS Science Team]

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) was developed by Arizona State University, Tempe, in collaboration with Raytheon Santa Barbara Remote Sensing. The THEMIS investigation is led by Dr. Philip Christensen at Arizona State University. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the prime contractor for the Odyssey project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Arizona State University