THE SOLAR SYSTEM INFORMATION SYSTEM - DESIGN AND APPLICATION
A.C.Cook, F.Trauthan, E.Hauber, N.Bohne, and K.Eichentopf
DLR, Institute of Planetary Exploration,12489 Berlin; Germany
Commission IV, Working Group 5
KEY WORDS: Extraterrestrial, GIS, Raster, Database, Global, Cartography.
ABSTRACT
The Solar System Information System (SOLIS), is a research tool being developed for use by scientists in order to help them to
determine the geographical extent, temporal nature, and quality of planetary data, and also for the testing of simple scientific
hypotheses against a set of knowledge about a planet. We present an overview of our design to date, describing some important
aspects concerning the storage of information about images, and the compact and efficient access to planetary cartographic
raster data. We also describe a bibliographic facility. Finally we present two example applications of our system.
1. INTRODUCTION
DLR is involved in the planning of imaging sequences for
the Mars 96 spacecraft (Neukum et al., 1995; and see
appendix), and in the processing and analysis of spectral and
stereo remote sensing data for a variety of planetary objects.
These include the Moon, Mars, the moons of Jupiter and
Saturn, and the asteroids Ida and Gaspara.
In view of the many different spacecraft and planets
involved, it is desirable to have a versatile database system,
akin to a Geographical Information System (GIS), which can
search, validate, and display graphical information about the
planetary remote sensing datasets. Knowledge about each
planet is held as logical facts, rules, and look-up tables. The
system needs to be capable of handling the huge numbers of
records concerning images returned by modern spacecraft. It
must also allow for the distorted footprint shapes, moving
cameras, and macro-pixels configurations of non-framing
spacecraft cameras like those on Mars 96.
In our previous paper (Cook et al, 1994) we reviewed
existing planetary data systems, presented a design for
SOLIS, and demonstrated simple applications of a
development prototype. Here we describe our system in
further detail and give additional example applications.
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2. OTHER PLANETARY DATA SYSTEMS
Since our last paper (Cook et al. 1994), just two years ago,
there have been many developments in the availability of
planetary data (see table 1) and access to planetary data
systems with certain GIS-like characteristics (see table 2).
The user interfaces to these make use of hypertext markup
language (HTML) and are accessible over the World Wide
Web (WWW). We are considering making use of HTML too.
However all of these systems still concentrate on just basic
information about imagery, or are one-off programs intended
for specific missions or planets.
It appears that spacecraft and planetary ephemeris format
data is converging to a standard developed by the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and this is known as SPICE
(Acton, 1995). SPICE is a collection of ancillary planetary
ephemeris and spacecraft data files (kernels), software used to
produce these files, and software needed by scientists to read
the files and calculate derived quantities. We make use of
SPICE to generate the database for SOLIS.
It is also interesting to note that GIS techniques are starting
to be used by certain sections of the planetary science
community, for the geological interpretation of registered
planetary remote sensing raster datasets, using commercially
available GIS (Brackenridge, 1996; Coombs, C.R., 1996;
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Lunar and Institute
DLR Institutes/sites (under
Table 1: Example Starting Point WWW Sites for access to Planetary Data.
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Address Description
http-//www.nrl.navy.mil/cleme | The Clementine Lunar Image Browser (CLIB). Any region of the Moon can be viewed by clicking
ntine/clib/ on a global mosaic. One can select different resolutions and image sizes. Copies of the original
images can be retrieved. ;
http://humbabe.arc.nasa.gov/ | "Mars Today", by the Center for Mars Exploration at NASA's Ames Research Center depicts: (1) the Fi
MarsToday.html) current orbital positions of Mars and Earth, (2) the apparent size of the martian disc as viewed from fo
Earth and vice versa, (3) a simulated Earth-based image of Mars, (4) a global weather map from the ley
Ames Mars Global Circulation Climate Model.
http://fi- A browsable, zoomable, scrollable Mars Atlas. It shows the locations of thousands of Viking Orbiter Ac
www.arc.nasa.gov/fia/project | image footprints. The atlas has complete coverage of Mars in the form of greyscale maps at us
s/bayes-group/Atlas/Mars/ between 1/16° and 1/256° per pixel, and allows downloading of some raw Viking Orbiter images. m
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Table 2: Examples of Planetary Data Systems with certain GIS-like features.
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International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXI, Part B4. Vienna 1996
