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The map of Mars has been mapped the same way they map Earth and the cartographers form Ordnance Survey, the British mapping agency, do a great job in making it look far less alien than assumed to be. It looks like a planet that has never been seen this way before. In fact, it looks like a place that one could go to for an afternoon hike.

"I love planetary maps and find them visually very appealing ... but they do often seem to be, as is their inherent nature, very scientific and unnatural in their presentation," OS designer Chris Wesson said in a blog post. "We have set out from the start to treat the Mars data no different to how we would OS GB data or any other Earth-based geographic information or landscape."

According to Wesson, the main ingredient to give this map an Earthy feel are features like soft color palate, contours done in shades of orange and brow, cyan grid linen as well as a legend. As a matter of fact, simple components such as titles and scale bars, this map has a scale of 1: 4,000,000, can do a lot in making the map appear less spaced out. While analyzing the data obtained from NASA's open-source, used to make the map, Wesson realized that its alien geography was the biggest challenge.

"Mars is a very different topography to the Earth to map," Wesson said. "The surface is very bumpy but at such a large scale I had vast expanses of land that appeared flat relative to the craters each of several thousands of metres depth, hence the need for different lighting and surface exaggerations. This varying topography led to several attempts by trial and error to find a workable contour interval. Also the contours, which I generated from the elevation data, were very complex and jagged in appearance; trying to smooth them was quite a challenge," as reported by The Washington Post