A virtual reality study on Santa Maria Crater on Mars

This poster presents a study of virtual reality on selected sites on Mars. A Virtual Astronaut (VA) is created as an interactive virtual 3D environment for the planetary science community to support the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. A prototype study was conducted based on orbital and Opportunity rover data covering Santa Maria Crater in Meridiani Planum. The prototype VA provides dynamic visual representations of the imaging, compositional, and mineralogical data for the rover operations. It lets one navigate through the scene and interact with the environment, such as viewing in-situ observations, feature measurement, and an animation of rover drives. The system is optimized based on a set of performance tests and user feedbacks.