Mars — Printable Planetary Relief in 503 Parts (NASA MOLA)

Mars is not printed onto this disc. It is built out of it.

Olympus Mons stands upper left, about 21 km above the Martian datum in the source data. The Tharsis volcanoes run through the middle, and east of them Valles Marineris cuts a canyon system as long as a continent. On the wall all of that is real relief — 503 printed modules from 13.8 to 45.8 mm tall.

FROM PLANETARY DATA TO A WALL OBJECT

The elevations come from MOLA, the laser altimeter that mapped the whole planet from Mars Global Surveyor. Every module reads the ground beneath it and takes its median height. Six elevation bands then decide its colour: the deepest canyons and lowlands are dark chocolate, the volcano summits ivory white, with brown, terracotta, caramel and latte in between. Inside a band the height still changes, so the surface keeps its slopes.

SIX COLOURS, SINGLE-COLOUR PRINTS

Each module is printed in one filament. The six-colour look comes from sorting, not from a multi-material printer: twelve plates, one colour each, for a 256 mm bed.

WHAT YOU BUILD

A 600.6 × 601.5 mm disc, 45.8 mm deep at the summits, about 1.43 kg of PLA. Parts are numbered on the back and placed on a 1:1 paper wall template; the flat back faces glue to the wall.

A data relief, not a scale model: the vertical relief is exaggerated about fifteen times.

Elevation data: NASA / Mars Global Surveyor / MOLA Science Team (MEGDR, MGS-M-MOLA-5-MEGDR-L3-V1.0), PDS Geosciences Node. Public domain.