GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Code-in 2012 KDE

Marble: Create a map of the Jupiter moon Europa for Marble

completed by: Armen

mentors: Torsten Rahn, René Küttner, Dennis Nienhüser

Marble can visualize maps of the earth as well as for other planets. So far we only offer maps for Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and the Moon. But there is also some map material available for Jupiter and Saturn Moons.

This task is about creating a map for Europa that displays Europa's surface. You can use the texture data from http://astrogeology.usgs.gov :

Texture Map

Download the "Simple Cylindrical" version.

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 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 io as well as for creating a new map for this planet. 

After editing the file it should be possible to display Europa 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 Europa. The symbols for each item on the map should match the symbols in the legend.

Add some interesting information to the legend (like done for the historical moon maps in Marble): Check out plans for landing missions on Europa (really cool stuff!). Why is Europa of interest to space science?

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 Europa. 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 Europa.  This map needs to be provided in a way so that it can get uploaded to Marble's GHNS server.