Status and future developments in planetary cartography and mapping

Abstract

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 scientifi c 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 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 scientifi c 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 fi eld. 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.