New Visualization and Analysis Capabilities offered by NASA’s Solar System Treks
Emily Law, Brian Day, Solar System Treks Development Team · 2020
NASA’s Solar System Treks Project produces a suite of interactive visualization and analysis tools. The program is managed by NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute and developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These tools enable mission planners, planetary scientists, and engineers access mapped data products from a wide range of instruments aboard a variety of past and current missions, for a growing number of planetary bodies. As new missions are being planned to a variety of planetary bodies, these tools also are facilitating the public’s understanding of the missions and engaging the public in the process of identifying and selecting where these missions will land. The portals provide easy-to-use tools for browsing, data layering and feature search, including detailed information on the source of each assembled data product. Interactive maps, include the ability to overlay a growing range of data sets including topography, mineralogy, abundance of elements, and geology. They provide analysis tools that facilitate measurement and study of terrain including distance, height, and depth of surface features. They allow users to easily find and access the geospatial products that are available. Data products can be viewed in 2D, 3D and in virtual reality, and can be stacked and blended together rendering optimal visualization that reveals details that no single data set can show. Data sets can be plotted and compared against each other. In addition to keyboard and mouse control, standard gaming 3D mouse and joystick controllers allow users to maneuver first-person visualizations of flying across planetary surfaces. The portals also provide users the ability to specify any area of terrain for generation of STL/OBJ files that can be sent to 3D printers to make 3D models. Today, seven Solar System Trek portals can be accessed via Treks home site found at https://trek.nasa.gov. Along with the web portals, the project supports additional clients, web services, and APIs that facilitate dissemination of planetary data to a range of external applications and venues. In addition to two brand new portals being deployed, significant enhancements were made to upgrade Moon, Mars and Mercury Trek portals with a number of new data products added to them. The upgrades include new backend information models and catalogs that support better organization of data enabling: 1) additional search options such as search spatially by point, polygon, etc., 2) better download management, and 3) more intuitive user interface layout and nagivation. Specific to Moon Trek, new data products include Chang’e-2 DEM and mosaic, various GRAIL data products, LRO mosaics from Apollo 11 to Apollo 17, LRO DEM and mosaics for Lacus Mortis and the latest LRO Diviner Rock Adundance Map. Elevation profile tool is enhanced to support DEMs available. A new tool that supports current Lunar Laser Reflector (LLR) study and future LLR mission planning is also added to the Moon Trek’s advanced analysis tool kit. Specific to Mars Trek, new data products include global geologic map, MRO CTX and HiRISE uncontrolled global mosaics, M2020 landing site, a set of new landform and mineralogy products, as well as new Mars Odyssey THEMIS global mosaics. Specific to Mercury Trek, new data products include Crustal Thickness maps, several regional 5M Geologic maps, Gravity Anomaly data sets, Gravity Degree Strength data sets, Gravity Distrubance data sets, a number of regional mosasics and a number of terrain and slope data sets. Furthermore, Mercury Trek now supports dual-language (English and Japanese) menu control. Furthermore, in support of lunar exploration and science, Treks data pipeline was automated to generate create high resolution stereo elevation and ortho mosaics from orbital imagery. This pipeline automates stereo pairing selection based on overlap regions, sun angle, spacecraft geometry for user specified region. Its workflow includes data ingestion, stereo reconstruction, alignment, and removal of outlier points and distortion. For ease of use in conjunction with the DEM mosaic, the pipeline also produces associated color balanced ortho mosaic. At the request of JAXA, a new Trek portal, Ryugu Trek, as been developed in support of the historic Hayabusa mission. Besides Mercury Trek, this is another portal that supports dual-language control to facilitate the Japanese public being able to explore the carbonaceous near-earth asteroid along with Hayabusa-2. It features Ryugu’s fascinating shape and amazing terrain showcasing the latest data returned by the mission. It highlights the landing sites for the four small rovers that investigated the asteroid surface to inform the environmental and geological context of the samples collected from Ryugu. It also highlights 13 surface features on Ryugu that were the first to receive official names. Beta testing of this portal is in progress, it is expected to be released to the public by the time this presentation takes place. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is currently exploring the carbonaceous near-Earth asteroid Bennu, with a goal of returning a sample of at least 60 grams. A new Trek portal, Bennu Trek, has been developed. It features the amazing surface data of Bennu including several global mosaics, slope and digital elevation models, and a colorized boulder abundance map. It also highlights 12 landforms on Bennu that were the first to receive official names including 11 saxa and 1 boulder field. Beta testing of this portal is in progress, it is also expected to be released to the public by the time this presentation takes place. NASA’s online, web-based Solar System Treks planetary visualization portals provide exciting, interactive, immersive tools that allow scientists, mission planners, students, and the public to see and understand planetary surfaces in ways they never have before. The EPSC community is invited to provide suggestions and requests as the development team continues to expand the capabilities of the portals and to plan development of new portals for other subjet planetary bodies. The authors would like to thank the Planetary Science Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, NASA’s SMD Science Engagement and Partnerships, and the Advanced Explorations Systems Program of NASA’s Human Exploration Operations Directorate for their support and guidance in the development of the Solar System Treks.