Marble can visualize maps of the earth as well as for other planets. So far we only offer maps for Venus, Earth, Mars and the Moon. But there is also some map material available for Mercury (and the Messenger is about to improve the data vastly).

This task is about creating a map for Marble that displays Mercury's surface. You can use the texture data from www.mapaplanet.org :

Map-A-Planet - Mercury

The data should be retrieved in the highest resolution available.

Then the data needs to be integrated: For this you need to create an xml file in the "dgml" format. You can download some example zip files of maps for Venus and Mars here:

Marble Maps

Unzip them and have a look at the dgml files. Find out which changes you need to make for support of the planet mercury as well as for creating a new map for this planet. 

After editing the file it should be possible to display Mercury inside Marble.

However it's still missing labels for place names. These can e.g. get downloaded

from here:

Planetary Names USGS

Inside the marble source code you'll find a conversion script that worked for earlier use of this website. It might need to get updated to work properly again. 

The result of the conversion should allow the map to display places on Mercury. The symbols for each item on the map should match the symbols in the legend.

At the end of the task the student needs to verify whether the data displayed is consistent with other sources on the internet.

So far no probe has landed on Mercury. So there are no landing missions to be displayed.

The expected result of this task is a full blown map of mercury displayed in Marble that uses the proper symbols for for all surface features on Mercury.  This map needs to be provided in a way so that it can get uploaded to Marble's GHNS server.