Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a federally funded research facility and development center managed for NASA by Caltech that carries out robotic space and Earth science missions. JPL has conducted robotic missions to study all the planets in the solar system as well as asteroids, comets and the Earth's moon. Today JPL continues its world-leading innovation, implementing programs in planetary exploration, Earth science, space-based astronomy, and technology development.

Through the missions involving collecting data from Earth's moon JPL has created MoonTrek, a mapping and modeling portal. The site contains high-resolution data sets covering most of the Moon. These include imagery and digital elevation models - but also hundreds of layers of spectrometry, radiometry, gravity fields, radar, slope, roughness, mineralogy. Additionally, there are tools that allow for analysis and rendering of derived datasets.

JPL is partnering with California State University - Los Angeles, College of Engineering, Computer Science, and Technology to build an interface between MoonTrek and telescopes amateur astronomers use to look at the Moon. When images from the telescope are routed to a laptop or a smartphone they will be annotated with names of lunar features and landmarks, local temperature, chemical makeup of the soil -- or any available information the astronomer chooses.

Group Members

Hector Sanchez - Team/Design Lead
Armen Minassian - Demo/QA Lead
Ruolan Shen - Customer Liaison/Communication Lead
Sebastian Sunjoto - Documentation Lead/Community Outreach
Yiliang Wu - Components Lead
 

Liaisons

Emily Law - emily.s.law@jpl.nasa.gov

Shan Malhotra - shantanu.malhotra@jpl.nasa.gov

Advisor

Weronika Cwir - wcwir@calstatela.edu