Astropedia Web Portal

Astropedia is a planetary data and cartography catalogue housed by the USGS Astrogeology Science Center. For users and scientists that require access to planetary geospatial data, Astropedia serves as a data portal that allows for easier ingestion, presentation and delivery of cartographic products in an efficient and consistent manner. Astropedia uses a PostgreSQL Database with PostGIS add-ons, an Alfresco Document Management System (DMS) as a data repository, Openlayers for web-based interactive mapping, and Mapserver as a WMS to serve the planetary base maps.

Goals

Astropedia provides a onestop-shop, web-accessible data portal that can be searched using multiple methods including: target information, geospatial coordinates, mission or instrument keywords, author and organization, as well as additional descriptive information available from the metadata. The USGS Astropedia data portal has several goals:

  • Quick access to current and featured data
  • Robust searching
  • Data downloads in various formats
  • Viewable metadata
  • Interaction through web map services
  • Cross-links to ancillary and relevant data

These goals are accomplished through extensive use of well-documented, standardized metadata and several open-source tools listed above.

PDS Annex

The PDS Annex is accessible through the Astropedia search portal. Many of these products have been derived from PDS data collections and are in the form of cartographic maps and digital image mosaics.