This is a model of Gale Crater, where the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity is roving around and blasting holes in the landscape. It's 1:1925000 scale. The Curiosity Rover would be about two microns long, or about the length of one E. coli cell. There is already a model of Gale Crater on Thingiverse (see thing:28190 by neurothing, and its derived thing:28619 by Doomcow), but I suspect the data they used to create the heightmap is not simple elevation data. Also, the way they did the mesh simplification resulted in a model without a flat bottom. I loved their idea, but I decided to start over. I wanted to be sure I was capturing the actual topography of the crater rather than some other optical property, and so I used the survey data from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) Topography experiment aboard the Mars Global Surveyor. The data is available here : http://www.mapaplanet.org/explorer/help/data_set.html#mars_mgs_mola_topo I then squelched the grayscale image to range from 0-200, and used Vincent Sanders' png23d tool to create an STL file : http://kyllikki.github.com/png23d/ I then used MeshLab to apply a quadratic edge collapse decimation, reducing the face count from 779300 to 10000 (preserving mesh boundaries and topography). http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/ This should be easier to print and more accurate. I've printed two versions so far, both with Cura : https://github.com/daid/Cura The print shown in the photos is actually a "low" quality print. The "normal" quality print came out even better. -- UPDATE -- I printed a copy of this model on our lab's Ultimaker, and gave it to Dawn Sumner. She is a co-investigator for the MSL camera team led by Malin Space Science Systems, one of the Long Term Planners (LTPs) for the mission. She's also co-chair of the mapping group. Dawn was on the Landing Site Working Group, and helped choose Gale Crater as the landing site for the Curiosity Rover. http://mygeologypage.ucdavis.edu/sumner/Dawns_Research/Home.html If figured it was only fair that she get my first print, especially since she's also at UC Davis. Here's her post on Twitter about the print : https://twitter.com/sumnerd/status/245937514752405504