Planetary mapping
GIS Support
- GRASS lat/lon regions may be used as 0-360 longitude, not just 180 east+west.
- In GRASS 6 you can set and add custom ellipsoids, see the g.setproj module. Permanently adding custom ellipsoids can be done by hand, the config tables for that are plain self-documenting text files, so reasonably easy to edit. An ellipse table with planetary spheroids (to put as $GISBASE/etc/*.table files) is available here.
- GRASS 7 now includes the planetary ellipsoid tables and support is present in the wxGUI location wizard.
Open Issues
- r.out.gdal exports 'unknown' ellipsoids / datums, and also the reference meridian is named 'Greenwich'
Example of the use of GRASS GIS in Planetary Research
GRASS ps.map output as published in an article in the journal Science.
![](/w/images/Psmap_on_sciencemag.png)
Data
Data summary (1999):
http://publish.uwo.ca/~pjstooke/mapsummy.txt
Modules
- r.in.gdal will handle HDF and netCDF and many many more formats
- r.in.bin will load raw binary data
- see also the GRASS and GMT wiki page for interfacing with GMT Mapping Tools
Mars topography
See tutorial in GRASSNews volume 1:
- Global dataset of bathymetry and topography. GRASS Newsletter, 1:8-11, August 2004. ISSN 1614-8746.
![](/w/images/Olympus_mons-medium.jpg)