The goal of this project is to create a map of the planet Mars, by using ESRI software. For this, a 3D project was developed using ArcGIS Pro, considering a global scene, to be published in an online platform. All the various data from Mars will be available in a single website, where everyone can visualize and interact. The Red Planet has been studied for many decades and this year marks the launch of a new rover, Mars2020, which will happen on the 17th of July. This new rover will be continuing the on-going work of the Curiosity Rover, launched in 2012. The main objective for these rovers is to determine if Mars could have supported life, by studying its water, climate and geology. Currently, the only operational rover in Mars is Curiosity and with that in mind, this project will have a strong focus on the path taken by this rover, during almost 8 years of exploration. In the web application, the user will be able to see the course taken by Curiosity in Mars’ Gale Crater, from its landing until January 2020. The map highlights several points of interest, such as the location after each year passed on MarsEarth year and every kilometer, which can be interacted with as well as browse through photos taken at each of the locations, through a pop-up window. Additionally, the application also supports global data of Mars. The two main pieces, used as basemaps, are the global imagery, with a pixel size of 925 meters and the Digital Elevation Model (DEM), with 200 meters per pixel. The DEM represents the topography of Mars and was also used to develop Relief and Slope Maps. Furthermore, the application also includes data regarding the geology of the planet and nomenclature to identify regions, areas of interest and craters of Mars. This project wouldn’t have been possible without NASA’s open-source philosophy, working alongside other entities, such as the European Space Agency, the International Astronomical Union and the Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature. All the data related to Imagery, DEM raster files, Mars geology and nomenclature was obtained on USGS Astrogeology Science Center database. Finally, the data related to the Curiosity Rover was obtained on the portal of The Planetary Society. Working with global datasets means working with very large files, so selecting the right approach is crucial and there isn’t much margin for experiments. In fact, a wrong step means losing several hours of computing time. All the data that was downloaded came in Mars Coordinate Reference Systems (CRS) and luckily, ESRI handles that format well. This not only allowed the development of accurate analysis of the planet, but also modelling the data around a globe. One limitation, however, is that ESRI only has the celestial body for planet Earth, so this meant that the Mars imagery and elevation was wrapped around Earth. ArcGIS Pro allows CRS transformation on the fly, but rendering times were not efficient, so the workaround was to project all data into WGS84. The slope map and respective reclassification and hillshading was developed in the original CRS. This process was done twice: one globally and another considering the Gale Crater. The results show that the crater’s slope characteristics are quite different from the global panorama of Mars. The crater has a depression that is approximately 5000 meters deep, but at the top it’s possible to identify an elevation of 750 meters, according to the altitude system of Mars. These discrepancies in a relatively small area result in very high slope values. Globally, 88% of the area has slopes less than 2 degrees, while in the Gale Crater this value is only 36%. Slopes between 2 and 10 degrees represent almost 60% of the area of the crater. On the other hand, they only represent 10% of the area globally. A considerable area with more than 10 degrees of slope can also be found within the crater, but globally the value is less than 1%. By combining Curiosity’s track path with the DEM, a profile graph of the path was obtained. It is possible to observe that Curiosity landed in a flat area and has been exploring in a “steady path”. However, in the last few years (since the 12th km), the rover has been more adventurous and is starting to climb the crater. In the last 10 km of its journey, Curiosity “climbed” around 300 meters, whereas in the first 11 km it never went above 100 meters. With the data processed in the WGS84 system, all was ready to start modelling Mars, which was firstly done in ArcGIS Pro. When the data was loaded, symbology and pop-ups configured, the project was exported to ArcGIS Online. Both the imagery and elevation layer were exported as “hosted tile service”. This was a key step, since keeping the same level of detail online and offline would have a steep increase in imagery size, to hundreds of Terabytes, thus a lot of work was put into balancing tile cache size and the intended quality of imagery. For the remaining data, it was a straight-forward step, exporting these files as vectors. Once all the data was in the Online Portal, a Global Web Scene was developed. This is an on-going project with an outlook to develop the global scene into an application with ESRI’s AppBuilder, allowing the addition of more information. In the future, there is also interest to increment the displayed data, like adding the paths taken by other rovers in the past, alongside detailed imagery of other areas beyond the Gale Crater. Finally, with 2021 being the year when the new rover Mars2020 will land on the Red Planet, we might be looking into adding it to this project.https://arcg.is/KuS4r

scripts.zip

arcgisTools.atbx: terrainDerivatives: make terrain derivatives from digital terrain model (Band 1 = TPI (50 m radius circle), Band 2 = square root of slope, Band 3 = TPI (annulus), Band 4 = hillshade, Band 5 = multidirectional hillshades, Band 6 = slopeshade). rasterizeFeatures: convert vector polygons to raster masks (1 = feature, 0 = background).

makeChips.R: R function to break terrain derivatives and chips into image chips of a defined size. makeTerrainDerivatives.R: R function to generated 6-band terrain derivatives from digital terrain data (same as ArcGIS Pro tool). merge_logs.R: R script to merge training logs into a single file. predictToExtents.ipynb: Python notebook to use trained model to predict to new data. trainExperiments.ipynb: Python notebook used to train semantic segmentation models using PyTorch and the Segmentation Models package. assessmentExperiments.ipynb: Python code to generate assessment metrics using PyTorch and the torchmetrics library. graphs_results.R: R code to make graphs with ggplot2 to summarize results. makeChipsList.R: R code to generate lists of chips in a directory. makeMasks.R: R function to make raster masks from vector data (same as rasterizeFeatures ArcGIS Pro tool).

terraceDL.zip

dems: LiDAR DTM data partitioned into training, testing, and validation datasets based on HUC8 watershed boundaries. Original DTM data were provided by the Iowa BMP mapping project: https://www.gis.iastate.edu/BMPs. extents: extents of the training, testing, and validation areas as defined by HUC 8 watershed boundaries. vectors: vector features representing agricultural terraces and partitioned into separate training, testing, and validation datasets. Original digitized features were provided by the Iowa BMP Mapping Project: https://www.gis.iastate.edu/BMPs.