Representing Planetary Terrains into a Virtual Reality Environment for Space Exploration1

摘要

3D terrain representation has been widely exploited in a number of applications to depict terres- trial surface simulations. Nevertheless, it could also be successfully employed by aerospace industry to repre- sent planetary soils, such as the Lunar and the Martian ones. In this paper, we are discussing the results of an application developed at Thales Alenia Space—Italy and aiming at building a detailed 3D model of such ter- rains for space exploration purposes.