Sunday, February 21, 2016

Exploring the Solar System


Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the GIS specialists Esri. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to map out new planets and new civilizations, to boldly go where no cartographer has gone before.

Esri has got a little bored with having to continually map the Earth, so they have now decided to turn their attention to the rest of the universe. The Solar System Atlas uses Esri's Story Map format to take you on a tour from the Sun, out past the inner planets, past the gas giants and out into the Kuiper Belt.

The Atlas includes interactive maps of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. In fact the Solar System Atlas includes more than one interactive map for some of these planets, including geological and topographic maps of Mars and the Moon.

The gas planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune don't have surfaces to map. However they do have moons. The Solar System Atlas therefore provides interactive maps for most of the moons of the gas planets. It also includes interactive maps for the moons of Earth and Mars.

Moving out beyond the furthest officially recognized planets the Solar System Atlas also includes interactive maps of the dwarf planets, Pluto and Ceres. The Solar System Atlas doesn't stop there. It also provides interactive maps for Minor Planet 4 Vesta and a number of asteroids and comets.

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