Mars Topography Display

The idea of terraforming Mars has been on my mind and probably many other peoples. It will probably become a realistic event but I don't expect it to a finished idea for another 100 or so years. Because of this, the idea of Terraforming can only be displayed in our minds and art. 

Luckily the nice people at NASA provide so many lovely photos of mars which is where my idea started. I choose this area of Mars because it has several nice craters and would make good topography.

I decided to turn the photo into a grey scale and increased its contrast in hope to bring out some of the details. Although now I know I could have used Fusion 360 to convert this to a 3d printable file at the time of this project I choose to use an online application called Selva3d. Their website allowed me to upload the photo and allow me to pick out certain dimensions and thicknesses. Luckily the website offered a free option and honestly it worked perfectly. 

3D Printing

I wanted to print 3 copies of the landscape each representing a different stage of Terraforming.

1.Current Mars

2.Mars after Green House effect creating lakes of water (100 years)

3.Plant life occurs and Lakes become permanent (150-200 years)

Just because of convenience I printed each landscape in Black PLA and gave a light sanding to remove any strings. 100% infill because I usually print every like that.

The Ender 3 Pro did an amazing job at printing. 

Painting 

All of the prints were painted a pumpkin orange. The all of the  topographies were given a dry brush of brown just to increase dimension so you could easily see the craters and low areas.

The second one got slightly green tone added to areas were I believed lakes and rivers were most likely. The orginal pumpkin orange was still majority and gave the idea that climatic changes were occurring but yet to be critical to the overall environment. The lakes and rivers were created using clear epoxy. I wasn't to worried about removing the bubbles or artifacts from the epoxy they added to the topography.

The third one got the same effect and again got painted pumpkin orange but most got covered with green. The green for the most part was to represent the growth of plant life and the establishment of ecology. I thought it was best to leave some of the orange because mars will probably always have it in some place on the planets surface. I also darkened all the lakes with a dark blue and green to give it a little color. Although on mars the oceans might not end up these colors.

All the landscapes were given semi gloss finish and displayed as it shows below

I hope you enjoyed my write up

Thanks for reading