MARS CRATER DEPTHS

Modded Visualization by Sreekar Gadasu

Depth Legend



The visualization offers visitors a mesmerizing journey through the Martian landscape, showcasing the vast diversity of craters scattered across the planet's surface. Through a modded D3-based visualization, we present an immersive exploration of the global dataset containing a part of approximately 380,000 Martian craters.

The design features an interactive interface that allows users to navigate the Martian terrain and delve into individual craters. Each crater is represented as a unique triangle, with attributes such as latitude location, diameter, depth, and number of layers of soil encoded using visual channels like color, triangle-height, base-length, and number concentric circles. Visitors can interact with the visualization to hover on specific regions, to clearly observe the highlighted triangle to read the shape of the crater.

y-axis depth of the crater
x-axis: latitude location of the crater
base-length of the triangle: diameter of the crater
number of concentric circles: number of soil layers

-> From the visualization, one can understand that the number of craters in northern hemi-sphere of Mars is higher than that of southern hemi-sphere.

Category of Custom Visualization: Modded
The visualization falls into the category of "Modded" custom visualization because it builds upon existing D3 techniques. We integrate multiple attributes from the dataset into a single cohesive visualization. This involves mapping the attributes to visual channels such as position (x-axis for latitude, y-axis for depth), size (base length of triangle, size of concentric circles), and color (for additional encoding).