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ISIS - About

What is ISIS?

ISIS is an image processing app. Its focus is planetary surface imagery collected by NASA missions to the Moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies.

If you're familiar with commercial image processing packages like Photoshop, Envi, or ERDAS Imagine, you'll recognize many of ISIS's standard image processing operations, like contrast, stretch, image algebra, filters, and statistical analysis.

ISIS has unique features for processing data from NASA spacecraft missions such as Voyager, Viking, Galileo, Mars Global Surveyor, and Mars Odyssey. It can import raw mission data into a usable geospatial image product, and has tools for digital mosaicking of adjacent images, photometric modeling and normalization, removal of systematic noise patterns, overlaying graticules, and other cartographic/scientific analysis functions.

Valles Marineris Mosaic

Mars Hemisphere Mosaic

This famous mosaic of the Valles Marineris hemisphere of Mars was created using ISIS. The mosaic is composed of 102 Viking Orbiter images of Mars, and is projected into point perspective, a view similar to that which one would see from a spacecraft at a distance of 2500 kilometers from the surface of the planet.

USGS Astrogeology has used ISIS for:

  • Global mosaics : mosaicking hundreds or thousands of images collected by space exploration missions to create seamless, cartographically accurate, global image maps for use by the planetary science community for research and mapping. See our Map-a-Planet site to view these products.

  • Geologic Mapping : we create accurate base image maps for geologists to use in creating geologic maps. See our Planetary Geologic Mapping Program for more information about this work.

  • Scientific Research : Using ISIS to mosaic images of a region of interest to create a scientifically accurate image product, and analyzing the imagery based on spectral, textural, or other attributes. See the following Science Magazine abstract for examples of images from the Mars Exploration Rover Mission Microscopic Image that were processed and analyzed using ISIS as part of the scientific research resulting from the mission: Textures of the Soils and Rocks at Gusev Crater from Spirit's Microscopic Imager.