Identifying wrinkle ridges structures from Mars MOLA and Viking mission data using GRASS in.pdf

Proceedings of the Open source GIS - GRASS users conference 2002 - Trento, Italy, 11-13 September 2002 Identifying wrinkle ridges structures from Mars MGS and Viking mission data: using Grass in planetary geology. Alessandro Frigeri*, Costanzo Federico*, Giorgio Minelli*, Cristina Pauselli*, Cristina Caldarella * Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra, Geologia Strutturale e Geofisica, Universita? degli Studi di Perugia, P.zza Universita? 1, 06100 Perugia, ITALY, tel. ++39 0755852623, Fax ++39 0755852603, e-mail afrigeri@unipg.it Abstract The numerous missions to Mars have sent information about the red planet during last decades. Recently it has been shown that Mars has ice on its poles and that ice could be probably present all over the planet subsurface. The presence of ice on subsurface could drive particular geological structures. The so called ’wrinkle ridges’ structures could be related to this. Grass GIS has been used to import and store in a common geospatial database Viking image data and the latest Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) data. GRASS raster based analysis at different resolution has been used to identify wrinkle structures. The image modules are used to align Viking data with Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) DEM. 1 Introduction The large quantity of data coming from missions to Mars made necessary to deal with an efficient system of storage/retrieval of these data. Planetary Data System (PDS) represents a good example of distributed archiving system. The analysis of the data is thereafter difficult due to different reference systems and data heterogeneity. In this work GRASS GIS has been used to import and analyse dataset from MGS and Viking PDS archives. The case study is the morpho-geological analysis of wrinkle ridges structures present in different zones of the planet. Along with the working activity, the possible use of GRASS with planetary data has been studied, underlying the extra feature needed to embed in GRASS GIS to use it as efficient anal