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Lunar and Planetary Cartographic Catalog

USGS Astrogeology Science Center - Web-based Tools

Planetary Image Locator Tool (PILOT)
Planetary Image Locator Tool (PILOT)
Map Projection on the Web (POW)
Map Projection on the Web (POW)
Web Mapping and Feature Services
Web Mapping and Feature Services

The USGS Astrogeology Science Center provides various tools and web-based services to facilitate research through image location services (PILOT), live basemaps (Astro Webs Maps), image processing and map projection pipelines (POW), and a forthcoming update for the popular Map-a-Planet. We maintain these services under the scientific oversight and support of the NASA Planetary Geophysical and Geologic (PG&G) Cartography panel and NASA Planetary Data System (PDS).

  • ISIS – The Integrated System for Imagers and Spectrometers is a specialized image processing package. It has many standard image processing operations such as contrast stretch, image algebra, filters, and statistical analysis. Isis operates on both classical two-dimensional images as well as three-dimensional cubes collected from imaging spectrometers. The real power of Isis, however, is its unique capabilities for processing data from NASA spacecraft missions such as Voyager, Viking, Galileo, Mars Global Surveyor, and Mars Odyssey.

  • PILOT – The Planetary Image LOcator Tool is a web based search tool for the Unified Planetary Coordinate (UPC) database of the Planetary Data System. PILOT features SPICE-corrected image locations and searching capabilities using a navigable map, user selectable image constraints (e.g., incidence angle, solar longitude, pixel resolution and phase angle), and facilitates bulk downloads and/or image processing using POW.

  • POW – The Map Projection on the Web service was created to help researchers convert raw Planetary Data System images to a science-ready map projected images. The system integrates PILOT and the UPC, ISIS3, GDAL, and the Astrogeology processing cluster for its’ processing needs. See the LPSC presentation for introduction and walk through.

  • Astro Web Maps – Our Web Mapping Services (WMS) and Web Feature Services (WFS) are based on Open Geospatial Consortium standards and allow capable mapping clients to view full-resolution planetary mosaicked Basemaps.  Besides being available for community use, these services are critical for many of our others sites including Planetary Nomenclature, Planetary Geologic Mapping web site, Meteor Crater Sample Collection, and PILOT.  For ArcMap GIS users, please see these layers listed on the Esri data portal under the Planetary GIS group.

  • Map-a-Planet 2 – was released this year and represents a major update from the original and popular Map-a-Planet. Both services allow existing map-projected (derived) image products to be re-projected, stretched, clipped, and converted into a variety of useful formats. The new version will allow us to quickly add new mosaics and potentially many other derived science products for conversion and download. During this beta, the original Map-a-Planet will also remain available. For more help see this walk through (PDF)

  • GDAL – The Geospatial Data Abstraction Library is a translator library for raster geospatial data formats that is released under an X/MIT style Open Source license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. As a library, it presents a single abstract data model for all supported formats. It also comes with a variety of useful commandline utilities for data translation and processing. We have added support to read most derived (map projected) PDS3 (*.img) and USGS ISIS2, and ISIS3 cube formats (*.cub). There are various binary versions of the utilities available including a special USGS version of the original FWTools for 64bit Linux.