PLANETARY GEOLOGICAL MAPPING IN THE DIGITAL AGE WITH A FOCUS ON SMALL BODY MAPPING (Invited Presentation)

Planetary geologic mapping is a scientific investigative process that uses spacecraft images to enable investigation of the geologic evolution of planets, dwarf planets, moons, asteroids and comets from global to local scales. For the last decade NASA has required planetary mappers making U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)-publishable maps to use digital data sets and ArcGIS™ software, in which digital mapping projects are prepared by the USGS Astrogeology Science Center to support the mapping community. Digital mapping has enabled faster and more accurate map production, peer review, and editing, but also has brought challenges particularly in the area of training mappers to use the complex GIS software. This decade has also seen the extension of geologic mapping from relatively large objects (planets and moons) to small, sometimes irregular bodies such as asteroids such as Vesta and Bennu, comets such as 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto. Geologic mapping using images of these bodies affords new challenges, such as projection issues, the limited variety of geological processes that act on small bodies, the difficulty of discerning unit boundaries on heavily impacted surfaces, and the increasing necessity to use additional data sets such as color and topography over the grayscale basemap to define and characterize map units. In this presentation we will discuss these issues, as well as the challenges of geologic mapping as part of NASA mission science teams vs. more traditional mapping approaches.