NASA Lunar Mapping Copilot Contest

Description of the Project

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is returning a large amount of high resolution images. Although these raw images are accessible via NASA’s Planetary Data System (PDS) and the Lunar Mapping and Modeling Portal (LMMP), additional processing is required to transform these raw images to geo-referenced and mosaicked images that can be displayed in LMMP  as rich visualization layers which are highly valuable for future mission planning and development.

Description of Expected Project Outcome

The high level requirements of this challenge are to develop an application that will:

1. Allow user to specify filter criteria as input to PDS (Planetary Data Systems image selection. Filter criteria should at a minimum include: region (bounding coordinates), illumination and camera angle, and image collection time.  This will require changes to the existing PDS API.
2. Retrieve two raw images within specified location from LRO NAC (1 from the left camera and the other from the right camera) by using data access API provided by PDS Geosciences Node.
3. Import associated SPICE kernels (e.g., from the USGS database).
4. Generate map-projected and ortho-rectified imagery and builds mosaics from these two images. The output imagery should be formatted in GeoTIFF. The application should be developed to take advantage of a Hadoop-map/reduce cluster.
5. Provide GUI controls as well as the capability to be executed as a set of webservices.

Goals of this Copilot Contest

This is an awesome project!  And we need your help!

Here are some elements of your game plan that we will be looking for, specifically:

1. A plan for refining requirements
2. A plan for managing the PDS updates with contests
3. A plan for using contests to handle the geometry problems
4. Suggestions for how to employ Hadoop and/or EMR (and contests to explore that further)
5. Your plan should allow the PDS API updates and geometry tasks to run in parallel, if possible
6. Ample allowance for fixes and changes
7. We will need to give a demonstration at the conclusion of the project.  How should we prepare, test, and present this demo?
8. This is a Research project, and your plan should allow for that for changes, discovery, etc.

Your game plan and strategy doc should be very thorough and address all 8 elements above, in addition to whatever else you feel is needed.  Your Strategy document should explain how the contests will complete requirements, figure out the geometry tasks, etc.  Have fun!