Scientific Visualization for the Mars Exploration Rovers

We present an account of the scientific visualization techniques that were used to support science planning for NASA´s 2003 Mars Exploration Rover Mission. The great sophistication of the rover´s Athena Science Payload required a wide variety of visualization modalities to make the large amounts of scientific data accessible and readily understood by the science planners under the tight time constraints of the tactical planning schedule. A number of techniques were also newly developed to support science operations, including on-the-fly mosaic stitching and rendering, image cube visualization, and data fusion. Many other well-established visualization techniques were applied to science operations also, such as anaglyph stereo, high performance 3D visualization, and optimized I/O and memory management techniques for the loading, processing, and visualization of very large data sets. We discuss each of these topics and demonstrate their application in the MER mission with examples.