ENABLING EXPLORATION OF PLANETARY SURFACE IMAGES THROUGH A FAMILIAR INTERFACE: GOOGLE EARTH ENGINE

Planetary missions (including Earth) have returned vast amounts of data. Many processed products are available online, but with the challenge of manipulating large datasets. Educators face additional pitfalls as students may become frustrated with unfamiliar interfaces. For our NSF-funded accessible planetary volcanology field course (‘GeoSPACE’, award #2023124), we needed to provide access to date for both virtual and in-person cohorts without incurring license fees or steep learning curves.

For our 3 field seasons, virtual students analyzed remote sensing data (including digital elevation, visible and infrared multispectral images, and synthetic aperture radar) for each field site and prepared a “morning briefing” on the results. Other course exercises examined similar data for analogs on the Moon, Mars, and icy satellites. As the course is only 2 weeks, we used derived products available online or generated by faculty.

We selected JMARS (jmars.asu.edu) to host terrestrial data for students to examine and manipulate; non-terrestrial data could be accessed in JMARS or via online portals (e.g. Act QuickMap or NASA Trek). Unfortunately, students still had difficulty with access (e.g. Chromebooks cannot run JMARS) or laptops that struggled with large images. Others had difficulty with unfamiliar interfaces and focused only on data available in Google Earth, limiting potential analyses.

An alternative is Google Earth Engine (GEE), a scriptable interface providing access to cloud-based datasets including DEMs, Landsat, and Sentinel. The GEE site utilizes Javascript, but also has a Python API. Scripts can be published as “apps”, allowing web access through an interface similar to Google Maps (e.g. https://ee-jpiatek.projects.earthengine.app/view/geospace-sites).

Although non-terrestrial datasets are not yet in the GEE catalog, images can be uploaded and presented through the same interface if care is taken with projection and Earth basemaps made invisible. The benefits include a more familiar interface accessible via mobile.

We continue to update GeoSPACE to improve student experiences and are developing custom GEE apps to allow access to both terrestrial and non-terrestrial datasets, with options to annotate, add regions of interest, and extract quantitative information for analysis.