Q: It shows a red box, so I'm wondering if that's the event
The HiRise page gives some information about the image:
Latitude (centered) 11.797°, Longitude (East) 14.763°
If you use https://marstrek.jpl.nasa.gov viewer and then use the upper right corner airplane icon to go to 11.797, 14.763 you will find yourself centered on the same point as the red landmark in the HiRise page viewer, so I would say that the red landmark marks either the center of the HiRise image or the landslide.
If you open the "JPEG Black and white map projected" image on the HiRise page (or the non-map projected one), you will see that the landslide is almost centered on the image so there is not much different between the two possibilites.
The red box is probably the image, but I haven't checked if the scale is correct.
The "JPEG Black and white map projected" is 5km across.
Q: [I'm wondering] if the map viewer will not zoom in sufficiently?
Q: Can this Google viewer be used to find this crater? If so, how?
The map viewer at the bottom of the page is the same as this one: https://www.google.com/mars/
In the "About" page (https://www.google.com/mars/about.html) it suggests that images for the viewer come from these data sets: http://www.mars.asu.edu/data/ (Themis data set among the others).
These data sets do not seem to include HiRise, so that might be why the landslide is not there.
A resolution problem might be as well, for example if you use this viewer https://marstrek.jpl.nasa.gov and go to the same spot (same Lat/Long) the image will soon become very blurry (and it is also from a Viking set, so probably too old to contain the landslide).
Another problem might be that by using the viewer at the bottom of the page (or also use this http://jmars.mars.asu.edu/maps/?layer=thm_nightir_100m_v8 to directly browse Themis images) the spot indicated by the landmark seems to be in a "dark area" on the right of a "ridge".
So maybe this is an additional reason of why we can't see the landslide there.
To get a better view of the landslide, I would follow Conelisinspace suggestion and check the high resolution JP2 image from the HiRise page.
However, viewing these JP2 images is not easy, for two reasons:
- the JPEG2000 format is usually not natively supported by the default image viewers on your operating system and installing a JPEG200 viewer is not always straightforward (based on my experience with some Linux and Windows computer, I haven't tried on Mac).
- even after installing a JPEG2000 viewer, these images are HUGE! (i.e. 20.000 x 15000 pixels or even bigger!). So opening these images can be very slow / exceed available memory.
My best solution so far involved installing some libraries/Python packages so that in the end I was able to open them using Python.
In the following, I share the code I used to open the ESP_054066_1920_RED.JP2 image for the landslide.
In the code, I also cut the image so that the part showing the landslide is shown and the rest is left out.
The resulting smaller image is saved to .PNG format and I've uploaded it so that it's possible to see the landslide in this post without running any code.
Link to image on Imgur: https://i.stack.imgur.com/lu5Aw.jpg
Enjoy!
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from PIL import Image
import numpy as np
jpgfile = Image.open("ESP_054066_1920_RED.JP2")
data_array = np.array(jpgfile)
print(data_array.shape)
#uncomment the following to see whole image in Python
#plt.imshow(data_array, origin='lower', cmap='gray')
#plt.show()
reduced_img = data_array[7500:12750,10500:13000]
plt.imsave('landslide.png', reduced_img, origin='lower', cmap='gray')
