Web‐based planetary image dissemination platforms usually show outline coverage of available data and offer querying for metadata as well as preview and download. While the usual form of presenting multiorbit data sets is to merge the data into a larger mosaic, for change detection purposes it is essential to maintain the individual images as an important snapshot of the planetary surface taken at a specific time. We introduce the web‐based interactive Mars Analysis and Research System (iMARS web‐GIS), which is specialized on planetary surface change analysis with novel tools for simultaneous visualization of single images as time series in their original sequence. As the data foundation, we use the vast quantity of automatically coregistered orthoimages and digital terrain models (DTM) from three NASA missions' instruments processed and ingested in the context of the EU‐funded iMars project. The baseline for the coregistered images are the High‐Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) multiorbit quadrangle image mosaics, which are based on bundle block‐adjusted multiorbit DTM mosaics. Additionally, we make use of the existing along‐track bundle‐adjusted HRSC single images and DTMs available at the planetary data archives. We provide two science cases for exemplary workflows of the multitemporal single‐image analysis, demonstrating the dedicated tools for surface change interpretation—one near Mawrth Vallis and one near the south pole. A web mapping application including the presented functionality has been implemented and is available at http://imars.planet.fu-berlin.de with the iMars project website (http://www.i-mars.eu/web-gis) serving as a mirror.
Understanding planetary atmosphere-surface exchange and extra-terrestrial-surface formation processes within our Solar System is one of the fundamental goals of planetary science research. There has been a revolution in planetary surface observations over the last 15 years, especially in 3D imaging of surface shape. This has led to the ability to overlay image data and derived information from different epochs, back in time to the mid 1970s, to examine changes through time, such as the recent discovery of mass movement, tracking inter-year seasonal changes and looking for occurrences of fresh craters.Within the EU FP-7 iMars project, we have developed a fully automated multi-resolution DTM processing chain, called the Co-registration ASP-Gotcha Optimised (CASP-GO), based on the open source NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline (ASP) [Tao et al., this conference], which is being applied to the production of planetwide DTMs and ORIs (OrthoRectified Images) from CTX and HiRISE. Alongside the production of individual strip CTX & HiRISE DTMs & ORIs, DLR [Gwinner et al., 2015] have processed HRSC mosaics of ORIs and DTMs for complete areas in a consistent manner using photogrammetric bundle block adjustment techniques. A novel automated co-registration and orthorectification chain has been developed by [Sidiropoulos & Muller, this conference]. Using the HRSC map products (both mosaics and orbital strips) as a map-base it is being applied to many of the 400,000 level-1 EDR images taken by the 4 NASA orbital cameras. In particular, the NASA Viking Orbiter camera (VO), Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC), Context Camera (CTX) as well as the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) back to 1976. A webGIS has been developed [van Gasselt et al., this conference] for displaying this time sequence of imagery and will be demonstrated showing an example from one of the HRSC quadrangle map-sheets.Automated quality control [Sidiropoulos & Muller, 2015] techniques are applied to screen for suitable images and these are extended to detect temporal changes in features on the surface such as mass movements, streaks, spiders, impact craters, CO2 geysers and Swiss Cheese terrain. For result verification these data mining techniques are then being employed within a citizen science project within the Zooniverse family. Examples of data mining and its verification will be presented.