Life cycle of a planetary body definition for scientific analysis

Abstract

Something as seemingly simple as defining the size of a planetary body is a critical first step required to support the creation of all mapping products and resulting scientific analysis. The life cycle in defining the body size is evolved from the initial Earth-based observations, then refined using acquired data from planetary missions, published in the peer-reviewed literature and adopted by standards- setting working groups, integrated into various libraries and applications, and finally made available for the creation of derived cartographic data products. Here we expose these steps to help users understand the benefits for using standardized definitions to enable data usability and interoperability by looking at the definition for the moon Enceladus.