Watch Mars surface in super detail

​London: A team of scientists has shown in unprecedented detail the surface of Mars -- including the location of Beagle-2, the British landing spacecraft -- using a revolutionary image stacking and matching technique.

With the help of Super-Resolution Restoration (SRR) technique, the researchers have stacked and matched images taken from orbit, to reveal objects at a resolution up to five times greater than previously achieved.

"Using novel machine vision methods, information from lower resolution images can be extracted to estimate the best possible true scene.

This technique has huge potential to improve our knowledge of a planet's surface from multiple remotely sensed images," said lead author Yu Tao, research associate from the University College London’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory in Britain.

"We now have the equivalent of drone-eye vision anywhere on the surface of Mars where there are enough clear repeat pictures. It allows us to see objects in much sharper focus from orbit than ever before and the picture quality is comparable to that obtained from landers,” said one of the researchers, professor Jan-Peter Muller.

By stacking and matching pictures of the same area taken from different angles, SRR allows objects as small as 5cm (about 2 inches) to be seen from the same 25cm telescope.

For Mars, where the surface usually takes decades to millions of years to change, these images can be captured over a period of ten years and still achieve a high resolution, the researchers noted.