Mapping Mountain on Mars in Matlab

It has been a crazy week planning a Mars Mission. I decided to spend 10 minutes actually making a map of Mons Olympus in Matlab

I used Chat GPT to generate graphical data of climber height vs time and it didn’t make much sense because it climbing 2.5x the size of Everest in 600 seconds so I’m assuming this is simulation time and not actual time to climb the volcano.

Then I made a simple conic representation of Mon Olympus and a placed mark in Matlab:

And that is it. It may not be glorious but it was fun. Here is the code for the distorted conic section from ChatGPT

% MATLAB Script to Create a Distorted Conic Section with Orange Gradient

% Parameters for Olympus Mons

height = 22000; % Height of Olympus Mons in meters

radius = 60000; % Base radius in meters

num_points = 50; % Number of points for the base

% Create a meshgrid for the cone

[x, y] = meshgrid(linspace(-radius, radius, num_points), linspace(-radius, radius, num_points));

% Define the z values for the distorted cone (Gaussian-like distortion)

z = height * exp(-0.0001 * (sqrt(x.^2 + y.^2))); % Create a Gaussian-like surface

% Create the figure

figure;

% Plot the distorted conic section with an orange gradient

surf(x, y, z, ‘FaceColor’, ‘interp’, ‘EdgeColor’, ‘none’);

colormap(autumn); % Use autumn colormap for orange gradient

colorbar; % Show color scale

% Hold on to add a marker

hold on;

% Plot a marker at the peak of Olympus Mons

plot3(0, 0, height, ‘ro’, ‘MarkerSize’, 10, ‘MarkerFaceColor’, ‘r’, ‘MarkerEdgeColor’, ‘k’); % Red marker

% Finalize the plot

xlabel(‘X (m)’);

ylabel(‘Y (m)’);

zlabel(‘Height (m)’);

title(‘Distorted Conic Section of Olympus Mons’);

grid on;

axis equal; % Equal scaling for all axes

view(3); % Set view to 3D

hold off;