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| Titel |
Communication of Science Plans in the Rosetta Mission |
| VerfasserIn |
Albrecht Schmidt, Björn Grieger, Stefan Völk |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2014
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 16 (2014) |
| Datensatznummer |
250095223
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2014-10673.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Rosetta is a mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) to rendez-vous with
comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko in mid-2014. The trajectories and their
corresponding operations are both flexible and particularly complex. To make
informed decisions among the many free parameters, novel ways to communicate
operations to the community have been explored. To support science planning by
communicating operational ideas and disseminating operational scenarios, the
science ground segment makes use of Web-based visualisation technologies. To
keep the threshold to analysing operations proposals as low as possible,
various implementation techniques have been investigated. An important goal
was to use the Web to make the content as accessible as possible. By adopting
the recent standard WebGL and generating static pages of time-dependent
three-dimensional views of the spacecraft as well as the corresponding
field-of-views of instruments, directly from the operational and for-study
files, users are given the opportunity to explore interactively in their Web
browsers what is being proposed in addition to using the traditional file
products and analysing them in detail. The scenes and animations can be viewed
in any modern Web browser and be combined with other analyses. This is to
facilitate verification and cross-validation of complex products, often done by
comparing different independent analyses and studies. By providing different
timesteps in animations, it is possible to focus on long-term planning or
short-term planning without distracting the user from the essentials. This is
particularly important since the information that can be displayed in a Web
browser is somewhat related to data volume that can be transferred across the
wire. In Web browsers, it is more challenging to do numerical calculations on
demand. Since requests for additional data have to be passed through a Web
server, they are more complex and also require a more complex infrastructure.
The volume of data that can be kept in a browser environment is limited and
might have to be transferred over often slow network links. Thus, careful
design and reduction of data is required. Regarding user interaction, Web
browsers are often limited to a mouse and keyboards. In terms of benefits, the
threshold and turn-around times
for discussing operational ideas by using the visualisation techniques
described here are lowered. An additional benefit of the approach was the cooperative use
of products by distributed users which resulted in higher-quality software and
data by incorporating more feedback than what would usually have been
available. |
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