[OSM-newbies] OpenMoonMap? / OpenUniverseMap?

Akkana Peck akkana at shallowsky.com
Sat Nov 21 21:13:06 GMT 2009


James Ewen writes:
> Seriously, does anyone have any free digital elevation information for
> any planetary body or it's satellite(s) other than earth? What other
> than naturally occurring physical terrain are you going to map?

There's a free low-res radar altimetry dataset for the moon from the
Clementine mission. I'm fairly sure it used to be available online,
but all the links I found now are broken.  It's easy to find
the Clementine visual imagery, much harder to find the altimetry data.

Since Clementine there have been much more accurate measurements,
but I've never found that data publically available.

For Mars, NASA has some datasets available via CDROM: for instance,

Mars Global Surveyor - Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA):
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/shop/web_store.cgi?category=mgsmolaarc&cart_id=9121355.10577&store=catalog.setup

Mars Digital Image Model (MDIM) volume 7 has a digital topographic model:
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/shop/web_store.cgi?category=mdim&cart_id=9121355.10577&store=catalog.setup

I suspect these are Free (sharable) even if they're not free(ly
downloadable), but they don't actually say that anywhere so you'd
have to check to make sure.

But these DEMs are academic when you're talking about importing into an
OSM-style database -- OSM doesn't do DEMs anyway, does it?  All the
OSM howtos on creating topographic maps involve importing DEM data
from somewhere else, then going through elaborate procedures to
integrate it with the OSM data.

> Do we put POIs where the lunar landers are located? Do we mark out a
> track where the lunar rovers have traveled? Maybe a couple tracks
> where Spirit and Opportunity have traveled?

Features and points of interest are much easier. You can get a decent
starting point here: http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/index.html

For the moon, I used
http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/alph_excel.txt
to create a database for a little moon viewer I wrote 7 years ago,
http://shallowsky.com/software/justmoon/

The data only includes lat/long/diameter, so you can't get full
shape detail, just circles of varying sizes that approximate each
feature -- reasonable for most craters, not so good for maria and
rilles. I assume the Mars datasets are similar.

	...Akkana




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