As you can tell, we love Mars 💖 That’s why we — a small group of space and Ethereum fans — built Mars26. We aim to fuel excitement about the red planet and deep space exploration, and initiate further experiments around space, art and crypto.
Here’s our tl;dr👇
- Mars NFTs are the highest resolution, natural color images from Mars to date, developed from the latest NASA and ESA sources
- Our 16200 NFTs complete a 3D Mars, that is Open Source, for anyone to build on, extend and explore its endless possibilities
- Rare features derived from space exploration and science fiction
- Supporting the India Crypto relief fund (guaranteed via smart contract)
The rarest Mars images to date
See the red planet as close as never before!🔭🔴 We built Mars26 as an intuitive map that uses the latest available satellite images. While we saw growing demand from the space community, we couldn’t find any nice maps online. While Google’s Mars map uses low resolution images taken in the 70’s, NASA’s site only lets you frankenstein a mosaic of maps of multiple resolutions of non-matching colors.
This is why we spent the last six months creating the most detailed Mars images and a 3D Mars map. We published its source code and we are minting 16200 parcels of Martian land as NFTs on Ethereum, for anyone to experiment with the intersection of space exploration and decentralized coordination.
Additional to the unique images, each NFT comes with matching features
- 🌆Land. Representing a unique 2-by-2 degree surface area of the red planet, MARS enables you to showcase your art and NFTs on your own parcel.
- 🎨Art. Full, on-chain permanent access to the high-res Mars images.
- 🦄Rarity. Unique set of traits describing natural features like craters, sc-ifi features like popular places from literature and over 60 more feature categories, unique to the respective area. Check out the complete collection including all the features in our gallery!
- 🃏Origin. Access to guide and script to rebuild your images from source files. Be warned, you need a powerful computer, a large hard drive and patience!
- 👑M26. The M26 erc20 token which lets you change your parcel’s name. And might enable even more features in the future 👀
All Mars NFTs are distributed randomly and can be viewed on our 3D map!
20% of the auction proceeds go to 0x68A9, India’s Covid Crypto Relief Fund. 40% support the team and early contributors, 40% go towards the community and development grants (see Gnosis Safe here) for long-term development (see roadmap). 500 NFTs are time-locked for the team for 12 months (see on-chain) to prove our commitment and incentivize us to continue upgrading Mars26.
About us.
While we’ve been buidling Ethereum projects for a while, space exploration is our true passion and is what brought us together. We hope that our map inspires more people to dive into the topic, and create space art, content or apps.
There is something exhilarating about the unexplored, endless space out there — about the dream of us humans travelling among the stars. It’s a dream that spans cultures, genders, ages, borders. And while SpaceX is making great progress building starships, we think that us mid-IQs can also come together and advance humanity’s next frontier, by creating fun space stuff and connecting people everywhere around a common dream.
We also want to thank NASA’s Ames Research Center for their work on the Viking Mosaic, Caltech’s Murray Lab for their work on the CTX imagery, USGS Astrogeology Science Center for their work on MOLA HRSC Blended DEM as well as DLR for their work on the HRSC, NASA and Goddard Space Flight Center for MOLA, the University of Arizona for their work on HiRISE, Malin Space Science Systems for the CTX camera, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for various related work and all institutions involved in the PDS. We are truly standing on the shoulders of deep space giants.
