Personal motivation
When my child was little, we lived in a desert environment. We had gone camping in the desert many times and knew how the sand would feel and behave when it ran through our fingers, how mountains would have sharp rough edges and an uneven texture when they’ve been withered by gas and airborne solid particles instead of water – in short we knew the desert.
Some nights the lullaby was opening Midnight Planets, a Mac based application for viewing Mars imagery obtained by the rovers as if standing on the surface. Hours disappeared into it—not out of scientific interest, but recognition. The texture of wind-shaped rock, desert sand, horizons without vegetation. Familiar, somehow.
That experience is worth making accessible to a wider audience.
The Vision
In Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan wrote of a future where exploring other worlds becomes ordinary—where someone might sit in the evening, browsing the surface of Mars, pointing at rocks, wandering between locations. Not watching a documentary. Exploring.
With public rover data freely available, browsers capable of rendering 3D environments and AI ready to do the heavy lifting this is now buildable with reasonable effort.
What Pale Red Dot Will Be
A browser-based viewer for ground-level Mars exploration:
- Panoramic views from rover positions
- Navigation between locations (Street View style)
- Orbital context—terrain from above, then drop to surface
- Eventually, links from visible features to published research
No installation. Phone, laptop, tablet—just a browser.
The first version will be simple: panoramas to look around in. Later: full areographic awareness, where every pixel knows its Mars coordinates and data provenance.
Why Build This
The technical challenge is substantial. Coordinate transformations, photogrammetry, camera models, real-time rendering—and all of it on another planet, with unfamiliar coordinate systems and no familiar cartographic conventions to fall back on. (Even the terminology shifts: not geographic but areographic, from Ares, the Greek name for Mars.) Done properly, this exercises serious systems engineering. The development process will be documented here as applied MBSE practice.
But mostly: the data is public, the images belong to everyone, and access isn’t just availability. It’s experience. The goal is building the experience that makes the data come alive.
Scope
Four rovers: Curiosity, Perseverance, Spirit, and Opportunity. The last two are silent now—Spirit since 2010, Opportunity since 2018—but their images remain. Including them feels right.
The Name
Pale Red Dot nods to Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot—his reflection on Earth as a speck in the vastness. This project concerns another dot, a red one, and making it feel less distant.
Pale Red Dot is in early development. The series continues at systemication.com.