Driving directions for Mars. Pick a start and a destination, by name or by tapping the globe, and you get two routes: a recommended one that goes around craters, canyons and steep slopes, and the straight great-circle line for comparison. Each comes with a 3D view, an elevation profile, turn-by-turn steps, and travel time for a robotic rover, a pressurized crew rover, a bike or a walk in a suit.

The 3D view

A helicopter's view of the route over the real terrain: the camera sits low off one side of it, the start on the left, and the rover crosses it every 8 seconds while the marker on the elevation profile keeps pace; drag along the profile to move it yourself. Heights are exaggerated so the relief reads at this scale (the factor is in the corner; Mars at 1× looks flat from this far). Routes longer than about 450 km show their most rugged 400 km, labelled “Highlight”. The ground comes from NASA Solar System Treks' 200 m MOLA + HRSC elevation model for the route's own strip (the 10 km MOLA grid for wider strips and the land out to the horizon); its colour comes from the Viking MDIM 2.1 mosaic, and its fine detail from the Murray Lab's global mosaic of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Context Camera images (about 5 m per pixel), blended on your graphics chip. It needs a browser with WebGL 2; without it the panel simply leaves the view out.

How honest is it

The elevations are the real Mars: the MOLA MEGDR global topography grid from Mars Global Surveyor (NASA PDS, 16 pixels per degree), resampled here to 2048 × 1024 cells, about 10 km per cell at the equator with 1 m vertical precision. The elevation profile, the climb totals, the hover readouts and the shaded relief all read from that one grid; zooming in sharpens the imagery, not the elevations, so below 10 km the terrain readouts are interpolated. Once a route is chosen, its profile, its grade colours and the altitude readout are refined from NASA Solar System Treks' 200 m MOLA + HRSC blended elevation model (the same data as USGS Astrogeology's global 200 m DEM, public domain), sampled every 0.5 km on routes up to 750 km and up to 1,500 points on longer ones; the request goes to trek.nasa.gov with the route's coordinates and nothing else. The climb totals and the sol counts stay on the 10 km grid, and when the 200 m data cannot be reached the profile simply stays on the grid; the caption under the profile says which one you are looking at. The elevation profile is coloured by the route's grade in the direction of travel, measured over 2 km on the 200 m data (10 km on the grid): flat is under 1 %, “up” and “down” 1 to 4 %, “steep” 4 % or more (where the travel-time model's climb penalty doubles the time); on the map, a ⚠ marks where the route enters one of the listed hazard zones. Slopes are regional grades across one cell, not what a wheel feels; small crater walls are steeper than they look here. Climb totals add up the elevation change between route samples roughly 20 km apart, so they are a floor: sample finer and Mars gives you more hills. Until the 2 MB grid has arrived (or when you are offline) a fitted model with named features at their published elevations stands in. The suggested route is the fastest one the 10 km grid allows (a 20 km grid for trips over about 5,000 km): it counts every kilometre driven plus one extra kilometre for every 45 m of climbing or descending, the same rule the travel times use. Each kilometre inside a listed hazard counts six times over (ten for canyons), so the route goes around unless the way around is much longer; slopes steeper than the vehicle's limit are avoided the same way, and the crater or canyon a trip starts or ends in is exempt. Trips up to 800 km are then searched again on the 200 m elevation model for the area around the route (one request to trek.nasa.gov for that box, cells of 0.5 to 2 km), so a canyon or wall too narrow for the 10 km grid to see counts too: climbing is measured over about 5 km there and slopes over one cell. The finer route replaces the first one only when it keeps off at least half a kilometre more of slopes steeper than the vehicle's limit, or comes out at least 10 % cheaper by the same rule; the caption under the profile says when it did, and when the straight line would take a kilometre or more of too-steep slopes that the route keeps off, the line under the route cards says so. The listed hazards are 27 large craters, basins and volcanoes (centres and sizes from the USGS planetary-names gazetteer), Noctis Labyrinthus, the canyons of Valles Marineris and the Kasei Valles channel (outlined from the grid where the floor sits more than 1 km below its rim), and the 79,834 catalogued craters from 3 to 300 km across. On the 10 km grid a crater narrower than a cell is too small to steer around, so it counts only on trips up to 800 km, where the 200 m search draws each one at its true size. The search boxes know all 2,052 names the International Astronomical Union has adopted for Mars; a name takes you to the middle of that feature. Right-click the map (long-press on a phone) for directions from or to that spot, or to see what is there; click a place's pin for its card. Distances and bearings are real spherical geometry on a 3,389.5 km Mars. Travel times use the listed speeds and active hours per sol. The “at Curiosity’s real pace” line is the same distance divided by what the real rovers have averaged since landing, science stops and winters included: Curiosity 38.07 km since 6 Aug 2012 and Perseverance 45.22 km since 18 Feb 2021 (NASA/JPL, as of 11 Oct 2026), about 2.7 and 8.0 km a year; hover the line for the Perseverance figure. It is a comparison, not a schedule. The Earth line picks the nearest of 58 well-known great-circle distances and landmark lengths; “about” means within 8 %. Good for the feel of a traverse; do not plan a mission with it.

Mars time and sunlight

Mars time comes from your clock: the Mars Sol Date, Coordinated Mars Time (mean solar time at 0° longitude, the Martian UTC), the solar longitude L_s that marks the season, the equation of time and the sub-solar point are computed with the Allison & McEwen (2000) formulas, the same recipe NASA's Mars24 clock uses, and were checked against its published worked examples (agreement to 0.0001°). Hover the globe and the footer adds that spot's local true solar time, the Sun's height above its horizon and its hemisphere's season. The globe itself is lit evenly so every side reads as a map; the shaded relief is a fixed north-west hillshade, as on any map. Seconds are off by at most a leap second (none has been added since 2017).

Imagery and data

• Topography: MGS MOLA MEGDR, 16 pixels per degree (MGS-M-MOLA-5-MEGDR-L3-V1.0, Smith et al. 2003), NASA PDS Geosciences Node. US Government work, public domain.
• Global colour mosaic: Viking MDIM 2.1 (232 m/px), NASA/JPL/USGS. Baked here at 2048 × 1024 for the globe; when you zoom in, the tiles for the area on screen are fetched on demand from NASA's Mars Trek tile service (levels 3–7, down to 326 m/px) and their detail is laid over whichever layer you are viewing. Nothing is fetched until you zoom in, and the baked globe stands in while tiles load or offline. Public domain (US Government work).
• Close-up detail on the map and in the 3D view: the Global CTX Mosaic of Mars, V01 (Dickson et al. 2024, Earth and Space Science), from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's Context Camera, about 5 m per pixel. Once you zoom past the Viking mosaic's 326 m per pixel, its black-and-white detail is laid over the Viking colour, down to about 7 m per screen pixel; if its tiles can't be reached, the map stops at the Viking detail. Data credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS/The Murray Lab; the Murray Lab grants free use for all purposes. Streamed from Esri's planetary map service (astro.arcgis.com), which is also what the Murray Lab's own 3D viewer uses.
• Surface texture: Solar System Scope 2K Mars (CC BY 4.0), blended and shaded here.
• Place photos: NASA/JPL-Caltech (Jezero, Gale), NASA/USGS (Valles Marineris), NASA/JPL/USGS (Hellas), ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (Olympus Mons, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO; Korolev, CC BY-SA 3.0).
• Rover tracks: every Mars surface path that has been published, with the sol and distance at every point. Curiosity (Gale) and Perseverance (Jezero) are the rover teams' localization data behind NASA's "Where is the rover?" maps (the MMGIS traverse and waypoint layers at mars.nasa.gov/maps/location, mission MSL and M20), fetched 2026-10-16: Curiosity to sol 5,045 and 38.48 km, Perseverance to sol 2,009 and 45.22 km. Ingenuity's 72 flights (dashed blue, sols 58 to 1,036, 18.14 km by the flight log) come from the same map's helicopter layers. Spirit (Gusev) and Opportunity (Meridiani) are the corrected traverses from the PDS Geosciences Node's MER Analyst's Notebook (Washington University in St. Louis; Opportunity's by T. Parker): one point per drive, joined by straight lines, so their distance readings are the path length scaled to NASA's official totals (7.73 km and 45.16 km). Spirit's table puts the lander about 240 m from its pin here. Not drawn: Sojourner (about 100 m in all, never much more than 12 m from Pathfinder: smaller than a pixel at the deepest zoom) and Zhurong (no published path). All simplified to 0.5 m and stored with the app (13 to 57 kB each), so they do not update by themselves; tools/fetch_rover_tracks.py rebuilds them. NASA/JPL-Caltech and NASA PDS; not subject to copyright in the United States. The tracks appear once you zoom in far enough for them to span more than a few pixels, and over a track the map lets you zoom about 2.5× further than elsewhere (the imagery is simply magnified past its 326 m detail there); hover or tap a track for the sol and distance.
• Names, coordinates and elevations: IAU/USGS Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature (all 2,052 adopted Mars names, searchable) and published mission data.
• Craters: S. J. Robbins and B. M. Hynek (2012), “A new global database of Mars impact craters ≥1 km”, J. Geophys. Res. Planets 117, E05004, as served by USGS Astrogeology (Robbins V1 crater database); the 79,834 craters from 3 to 300 km across are packed with the app.
• Rover odometry: NASA/JPL, “NASA’s Perseverance Sets Off-World Record for Total Distance Driven”, 12 Oct 2026 (Curiosity 38.07 km, Perseverance 45.22 km as of 11 Oct 2026). Both rovers are still driving, so these figures age; the date is kept with them in the data file.

Made by Annas Rahman. Runs in your browser; the only requests it makes are for imagery and elevation from NASA Mars Trek and for the CTX mosaic from Esri, with nothing but the area being viewed. Not affiliated with NASA, JPL, ESA or Esri.