Status and future developments in planetary cartography and mapping

• Published in: Planetary Remote Sensing and Mapping pp. 285 - 299
• Main Authors: Naß, A., Di, K., Elgner, S., van Gasselt, S., Hare, T., Hargitai, H., Karachevtseva, I., Kersten, E., Manaud, N., Roatsch, T., Rossi, A. P., Skinner, J., Wählisch, M.
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: CRC Press 2019
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Planetary Mapping; Van Langren; Reference DEM; ICA; NOAC; Low Resolution DEMs; High Resolution DEM; OGC; MRO; USGS; Atlas Collections; Planetary Exploration; Planetary Science; Final Map Layout; Stereo Photogrammetry; Visualization Pipeline; ASI; RFM; Vo; High Precision DEMs; Cartographic Products; Dart; Distributed Data Processing
• ISBN: 9781138584150; 1138584150
• DOI: 10.1201/9780429505997-19

Planetary cartography does not only provide an extensive basis for supporting planning activities in planetary exploration, e.g., landing-site selection, orbital observations, traverse planning, but it also supports mission conduct by, e.g., observation tracking and hazard avoidance mapping. It also provides the scientific and technical basis to create science products after successful termination of a planetary mission by helping to distill data into maps. After a mission’s lifetime, experiment data and eventually higher-level data such as mosaics and digital terrain models (DTMs) are stored in archives – and eventually converted into maps and higher-level data products – to form a basis for research and for new scientific and engineering studies. The complexity of such tasks increases with every new dataset that has been put on the stack of data sources. In the same way as the complexity of autonomous probes increases, tools that support these challenges also require new levels of sophistication. In planetary science, cartography and mapping share a history dating back to the roots of telescopic space exploration and are now facing new technological and organizational challenges with the rise of new missions, new global initiatives and organizations, and opening research markets. The focus of this contribution is to summarize recent activities in planetary cartography and to highlighting current issues the community is facing to identify future opportunities in this field. By this we would like to invite cartographers/researchers to join this community and to start thinking about how to jointly solve some of these challenges. This chapter summarizes the history and activities in planetary cartography across the globe and highlights some of the issues and opportunities the community is facing. It introduces institutes and groups working in the field of planetary cartography and mapping. Planetary cartography has found its manifestation in governmental activities, community efforts, professional organizations, and private activities. A general aim for the planetary cartography community is to develop concepts and approaches to foster future cooperation between cartographers and non-cartographers. Primarily motivated by such objectives international cross- collaborations between institutes have been established to provide a platform for critical discourse within organizations, a constant contribution to different initiatives. In addition to professional and scientific applications, planetary cartography has sufficient data resources that would enable non-planetary cartographers to produce planetary maps for the general public. Professional planetary maps, typically geologic maps, are exclusively published for scientific purposes, except for a few other cartographic products published by the United State Geological Survey.