Four Years of Planetary Cartography with the Hrsc

The High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on the European Mars Express mission began operation in January 2004. With this camera system new standards were set for the acquisition, processing and cartographic application of planetary data, in other words a new era of planetary cartography began. A new cartographic concept for the planet Mars has been designed. The cartographic standard product is the Topographic Image Map Mars 1:200,000 series. The layout scheme of this map series is flexible also for the generation of maps in other scales, special target maps, thematic maps, and related products.For cartographic processing a new software system has been developed at the Technical University Berlin. The main purpose of the software package Planetary Image Mapper (PIMap) is to automate the map generation process. The software is controlled by an initialization file, which provides all parameters that are necessary to define map properties, contents, and layout. Until the end of 2007, about 70 map sheets in 15 different regions of the planet Mars have been derived from HRSC data. This comprises sheets of the Topographic Image Map Mars 1:200,000 series and special target maps in different scales for selected regions. Also maps as subdivision sheets in larger scales, i.e. 1:100,000 and 1:50,000, have been generated. The experiment clearly demonstrated the high quality of the HRSC image data and the flexibility of PIMap as well.