NASA's Solar System Treks - New Capabilities and New Worlds

NASA's Solar System Treks program produces a suite of online, interactive visualization and analysis portals. These tools enable mission planners, planetary scientists, and engineers to access data products from a wide range of instruments aboard a variety of past and current missions, for a growing number of planetary bodies. Originally initiated for mission planning and science, this technology has demonstrated great benefits for public outreach. As new missions are being planned to a variety of planetary bodies, these tools are facilitating the public's understanding of the missions and engaging the public in the process of identifying and selecting where these missions will land.

There are six web portals in the program available to the public. This year the three original portals, Moon Trek, Mars Trek, and Vesta Trek have been joined by three new portals. The new Ceres Trek portal complements the Vesta Trek portal with data returned from NASA's Dawn mission to the asteroid belt. Titan Trek highlights Saturn's largest moon, and Icy Moons Trek features a number of Saturn's other moons as studied by the Cassini mission. As web-based toolsets, the portals do not require users to purchase or install any software beyond current standard web browsers.

Using the portals, students and members of the public can conduct their own explorations of planetary surfaces, measuring diameters of craters, creating elevation profiles of peaks and valleys, and plotting traverse paths. The standardized Trek interface provides enhanced 3D visualization and navigation. Standard keyboard gaming controls allow the user to maneuver a first-person visualization of "flying" across planetary surfaces. User-specified bounding boxes can be used to generate STL and/or OBJ files to create physical models of surface features with 3D printers. Such 3D prints are valuable tools in museums, public exhibitions, and classrooms - notably including opportunities for the visually impaired. The new Virtual Reality Extension is an exciting addition to the Solar System Treks. Users can draw a path across the surface using the browser interface. A QR code is then generated which is read by the user's smart phone. Placing the phone in an inexpensive set of Google Cardboard-compatible goggles, the user then flies along their specified path in virtual reality.