It can be hard to get a sense of size in pictures from another world. This interactive lets you drop familiar objects onto the images so you can get an idea of just how big they are. See if you can figure out which object is closest in size to each of these pictures.

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About the images

Most of these images were taken by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. It has three cameras. One camera covers a small area, taking black and white pictures at a resolution of between 4 and 40 feet per pixel (a pixel is a single dot in the image). The other two take red and blue filtered images of larger areas at lower resolutions. These give more global views for looking at weather patterns, and provide "context" images that let scientists know what the area around the high resolution images looks like.

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You can play with this same interactive for other parts of this site as well:

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Mars Global Surveyor at JPL

 
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