Are the Mars elevation data publicly available?

Question

Is it possible to get the data on Mars terrain somewhere? Something like SRTM data for Mars.

Ideally in a format like this:

X,Y,E

where X and Y are coordinates of the region and E is the elevation (altitude) in that region.

Answer 1

There are two sources:

• MOLA laser altimetry (http://tharsis.gsfc.nasa.gov/mapping_data.html) with the actual data available from MEGDR (Mission Experiment Gridded Data Records) at http://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/mgs/megdr.html (the closest analog to SRTM you can get, but at a higher fidelity level).
• and DTM (digital terrain models from stereo pairs) (http://www.uahirise.org/dtm/).

DTM coverage is small, but the resulting topo models are awesomely detailed - they are good for assessing landing sites and building hi-fi virtual terrains at great locations (Marineris, Olympus etc.) One such example is the terrain model for the fictional Ares 3 landing site from Andy Weir's The Martian available here.

Please note that lava tubes/subsurface features aren't generally resolvable from either MOLA or DTMs and one has to go through the list of known tubes to guesstimate how far the li'l green man rabbit hole goes.