[Gdal-dev] Will GDAL do other planets?

[Mario Beauchamp]

Hi Mike,

Mike Logan wrote:
> I haven't researched this yet - maybe this is already supported, but
>  I can think of some reasons to have GDAL load,query,reproject
>  MARS or other planetary data.    Not so much data formats (although
>  that would be nice) but rather geospecific support (radius,eccentricity, etc).

The only experience I have with this is retrieving Mars imagery from a WMS server with my 
wmstool for OpenEV. The server in question 
(http://demo.cubewerx.com/demo/cubeserv/cubeserv.cgi?CONFIG=mars&) offers the data in 
different projections only defined by "made-up" EPSG codes like 42180,42181 and such... Frank 
once told me that these codes were not "official" codes and GDAL doesn't deal with those as 
such. For example, the EPSG:42180 (Mars/Geographic) is seen as EPSG:4326 (WGS84)... this is nice 
for simply displaying the image in OpenEV but of course cannot be used for reprojection.

> Has anyone ever tackled this idea?    Or would it be too much upheaval to the product?

I think we would simply require to have proper planetary datum/projection definitions in the csv 
files and assign them codes. Since Cubewerx already invent codes, why couldn't we? :)

Or maybe I'm missing something...
--
Mario B.