On December 19, 2019, our researcher Thomas Ortner, along with project partner Gerhard Paar, Joanneum Research, presented the 3D GIS program MINERVA, which was developed over two years, at the ExoMars Science Working Team Conference at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, Netherlands.
MINERVA - Mars INteractive Exploration based on Reconstruction and Visual Analysis - is the first data analysis framework that allows large amounts of data, such as those sent from Mars to Earth on the ExoMars2020 mission, to be processed in an integrated manner, that is easily understandable - and above all simultaneously and collaboratively - for researchers from different fields.
Based on three components - a special database and the two software technologies PRo3D and Visplore developed at VRVis - MINERVA uses a sophisticated workflow to provide an overview of the relationships between data and images. The processing of this highly heterogeneous data is made possible by MINERVA for the first time and is of particularly important for planetary scientists, especially those involved in the ExoMars mission.
Our Geospatial Visualization research group has been involved in planetary research projects for the past decade. Apart from MINERVA, we have developed further software technology solutions such as the interactive 3D visualization tool PRo3D (Planetary Robotics 3D Viewer).