Gale Crater in 3D: The Field Site for MSL

Gale Crater has been chosen as the field site for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, the next rover mission to Mars (http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl). Dawn Sumner, seen here, helped the MSL project evaluate the final 4 landing sites as co-chair of the Landing Site Working Group. She was part of the press conference announcing the choice. This video captures some of the reasons Gale was chosen.

The crater is ~150 km in diameter and there is no vertical exaggeration in the topography.

This video was filmed using a Virtual Globe program called Crusta written by Tony Bernardin at UCDavis, which runs on the VR library Vrui written by Oliver Kreylos, both of UCDavis' KeckCAVES (http://keckcaves.org). Oliver used two Kinects to capture Dawn as she described the Gale site in front of a 3d TV system with head and wiimote tracking with an optical tracking system. Oliver then re-rendered Dawn's interaction with Crusta and the Kinect reconstruction of Dawn together into one movie, including the sound track as well. The result is the merging of Dawn and Mars into a virtual world. (See http://youtube/okreylos for more on Kinect wiimote hacking.)

The imagery used includes MOLA topography, HRCS-derived topography, CTX images, HiRISE-derived topography, and HiRISE images, all courtesy of NASA/Caltech-JPL/ASU/AU except HRSC, which is courtesy of ESA. Data of various resolutions were combined into a single, multiresolution dataset that can be interactively manipulated using a quadtree data structure as implemented by Tony.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• yt3d:enable=LR
• mars
• msl
• nasa
• space
• kinect
• virtual
• reality
• keckcaves
• dawn
• sumner
• oliver
• kreylos
• Mars
• science
• laboratory
• rover
• gale
• crater
• 3d
• immersive
• visualization
• geology
• ufo

[Oldmartian]

Enjoyed your talk. I'm excited that you chose Gale, also. I'm impressed by the anaglyph effects.  I absorbed more info, I think.