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TOPOGRAPHY / MOLA MEGDR
Terrain & hazards
Sample real elevation across a region, derive slope from the height gradient, and classify every cell against the rover mobility limit.
16 px/°MOLA resolution
He never built it, so we did — and we gave it something to do. $MARS buys compute on a planetary network that runs on the real Mars: NASA's laser-altimeter elevation, the IAU's 2,049 named landmarks, and a live Mars clock.
We turn distributed compute into a planetary instrument.
Every contributed cycle resolves another piece of Mars: its terrain, its hazards, where a habitat could stand, what a rover could cross, how much sun a panel would catch. The output is a public model that gets sharper every day.
How the protocol works ↗February 2021. Musk is publicly worried about Dogecoin whale concentration. A follower suggests starting fresh. CZ names it. Musk promises it. Then nothing — for five years the most famous unlaunched coin in crypto just sat there.
The promise was the easy part. The reason came later, when Musk was asked whether Dogecoin could simply be the currency of Mars. His answer was that it could not — not for any reason of policy, but because of the speed of light.
Mars would need its own local currency. Light takes minutes to cross the gap, so anything that depends on staying tightly in step with Earth cannot work there. Some form of cryptocurrency on Mars is likely — but a standalone one, decided by the people living there.
Elon Musk, on why Mars needs its own money — reported remarks
A wallet holds an Earth balance and a Mars balance. There is no single synced number, because physics does not permit one.
Compute, missions and mining all clear on the Mars book the moment they happen. The colony never waits on Earth for anything.
Move value between the books and it travels at light speed — leaving one side at once, arriving on the other minutes later. It cannot be recalled.
Asked what the currency would eventually be, his answer was that dollars would not be — it would be mass and energy. So that is what this colony's reserves are measured in, and they are computed rather than declared: every kilowatt-hour and every tonne below comes from a verified job on real NASA data. The base can only grow when someone resolves more of the planet.
Not a mock-up. Click anywhere on Mars and read its true elevation from NASA's MOLA laser altimeter, its surface slope, the local solar time at that longitude, and which of the 2,049 IAU-approved landmarks you are standing in.
TOPOGRAPHY / MOLA MEGDR
Sample real elevation across a region, derive slope from the height gradient, and classify every cell against the rover mobility limit.
INSOLATION / MARS24
Integrate a full sol of true sun angles at a site to get its energy yield, driven by the same algorithm NASA uses to keep Mars time.
HABITAT / SITE SELECTION
A* traverses weighted by real climb, and a sliding search for the flattest buildable pad — scored on cut-and-fill against measured ground.
Real rovers keeping real time, and the jobs this network has already run against their ground. Every receipt commits to the one before it.
Find a real place on Mars worth resolving.
Spend $MARS; a node takes the job.
The workload runs on measured NASA elevation.
A hash-chained receipt lands in the public ledger.