WebGIS systems for planetary data access at the PDS geosciences node

Abstract

NASA’s Planetary Data System (PDS) is a geographically distributed system with five discipline and three support nodes that work together to archive and distribute scientific data from NASA’s planetary missions. The Geosciences Node focuses on data for Earth’s Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars. As of September 2010, the Geosciences Node holdings consist of about 50 TB of data, with the addition of about 1 TB per month. To support search and retrieval of data from the Geosciences Node archives, two online systems, Analyst Notebooks (ANs) and Orbital Data Explorers (ODEs) have been developed. Both ANs and ODEs have WebGIS systems embedded to enhance their map-based search and display capabilities. An ESRI® ArcGIS Server was used to build maps and publish web services. JavaScript application programming interface (API) was used extensively to access those map services and build web interface with interactive maps. This paper first reviews the existing planetary online map systems used in the planetary community. Then the challenges of planetary GIS are discussed. The development of WebGIS for ANs and ODEs with ArcGIS Server and JavaScript API is introduced. This paper also discusses data sharing through planetary Web service including WMS/WFS based on Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards. A solution is presented in this paper to solve the map projection issue of planetary Web services. Free client tools used to test the OGC WMS/WFS services are covered at the end of this paper.