Heights are stretched so you can see them: Mars is 6,779 km across and its tallest volcano is about 22 km high, so at true scale the globe would look like a smooth ball.
Places to land
Who has landed
Every spacecraft that has worked on the surface, shown as dots on the globe. Positions are rounded.
| Lander | Country | Landed | Where |
|---|
India's Mars Orbiter Mission (Mangalyaan) reached Mars orbit on 24 September 2014 and studied the planet from above until 2022; it did not land, so it is not on this list.
How we know
Heights from laser pulses
MOLA, a laser on Mars Global Surveyor, timed how long each pulse took to bounce back from the ground. From 1999 to 2001 it built a height map of the whole planet accurate to about a metre vertically. That is the globe above.
Close-ups from stereo cameras
For the landing sites, the terrain blends MOLA with stereo images from Europe's Mars Express camera (HRSC), about 200 m per sample. The images on top are from the Viking orbiters (1976–80), or from NASA's Context Camera at about 5 m per pixel where available.
Height above what?
Mars has no sea, so heights are measured from the "areoid": the level where gravity and spin would hold an imaginary ocean. Zero on this page is that level.