Abstract

GIS for Community-Based Planetary Landing Point Selection
Track: Parks and Natural Reserves
Author(s): David Curkendall

Landing point selection for planetary- and lunar-landing
spacecraft needs reliable input interaction with both the Project
Engineering and the Science teams. As the knowledge of
planetary bodies has become more comprehensive, this
selection becomes more-, rather than less- difficult since the
increased knowledge must be sifted in order to make reliable,
fully informed decisions. In the Summer of 2005, JPL joined with
USGS, Flagstaff, and Esri, Redlands to organize a feasibility
demonstration of an ArcGIS based solution relying on the OGC
data architecture to reach the available, comprehensive, but
distributed, Mars databases. The effort demonstrated the
possibility of creating a community built model that is made
universally available for information dissemination and
scientific/engineering interaction. This presentation will review
the results of that effort as well as the recent progress to build
global, high-resolution Mars and Lunar databases to support
studies searching for global areas of scientific interest and
landability.

David Curkendall
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Model-Based Systems Engineering and Architectures Group MS: 306-463
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena , California 91109
United States
Phone: 818-354-4888
E-mail: David.W.Curkendall@jpl.nasa.gov