UTILIZING PLANETARY GIS AND REMOTE SENSING DATA IN THE CLASSROOM

The past decade has seen as abundance of planetary data delivered from orbiters, landers and flyby missions. Global data exist or will be available shortly from Mars, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, and many of the outer planets and satellites. In fact, we now know the global topography of Mars and the Moon better than for Earth and we will soon have a similar dataset for most of Mercury. Moreover, remote sensing data for Mars exist (similar or better than LANDSAT in spatial resolution) that cover the visible through thermal infrared wavelengths. Lander datasets from Mars also provide ground truth to the orbiter data. All of these data are invaluable in the classroom and allow students to see our own planet in the context of the broader solar system. Tectonics can be studied across the rocky bodies and students can understand the uniqueness of Earth’s system. Geochemical data can be scrutinized to assess the igneous history of the inner solar system including the similarities and differences, and the aqueous history of Mars. A wealth of geophysical data can be studied from the topography and gravity of the planets and moons.

This talk will discuss the planetary datasets available and their formats, as well as the software to analyze them. Most data are publically available and can be analyzed in ArGIS, IDL/ENVI, Google Earth, custom packages and beyond. I will talk about GIS-based activities that can be done in the classroom from the freshman to graduate student levels across a variety of planets and platforms.