OPS-Alaska - Cartography of Mars

Cartography of Mars

"While researching another topic online, I happened to come across the website of the Interplanetary Cartographic Commmission," Thomas Gangale said. "I was intrigued because I had done some work in this area 20 years ago. I built a database that included not only surface features on Mars identified in satellite imagery and named officially by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), but also the names of albedo features drawn by 19th century astronomers such as Giovanni Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell, many of which they identified as canals, as well as geographic names from science fiction stories about Mars. Not knowing then what to do with that work, I shelved the project. Fortunately, many generations of computers later, I still had the electronic files, so I was able to pull the project from the shelf and pick up where I had left off. It was a strange feeling to resurrect and open files dated 1991 that I created on a desktop computer with only 512 kilobytes of memory and two 5-1/4 inch floppy drives. In terms of computer evolution, that was practically paleontology."

Gangale, Thomas, and Marilyn Dudley-Flores. 2013. Proposed additions to the cartographic database of Mars. Paper presented at International Cartography Association conference, 25-30 August, in Dresden, Germany.

The International Cartography Association's Commission on Planetary Cartography plans to publish the tables from the paper on its website and to integrate the OPS-Alaska database into its own. In the interim, the tables are provided here: