state or a standard 100 km radius Mars Exploration Zone can be displayed and moved on the surface of another planet or moon (currently, Mars, Venus, the Moon, Io, Titan and Jupiter), keeping its original size. This is a basic requirement to be able to identify and discriminate standalone “features” on the landscape. These are the contact lines of geologic units or features, and even think about their origin, stratigraphic relations (which was produced first, and which cut into that or covered that subsequently) or relief changes. Students should also focus to deliminate single features by identifying boundaries where a terrain changes. A few unusual phenomena that will likely be encountered in viewing orbital images or planetary maps are: the inability to discriminate sizes of simple craters and the abundance of craters problems in viewing craters and hills in inverted relief, the large sizes of canyons, troughs, volcanoes, lava flows the large sizes of terrains with undifferentiated (similar, or repetitive) relief features in general (without vegetation and man-made features that would otherwise segment an undifferentiated geologic substrate). Ultimately, by exploring a lifeless planet in imagination with a sense of the real scale, the unique characteristics of our own, well-accustomed terrestrial environments will be emphasized. The basic goal, however, is not just to add a sense of sizes to a map view, but to help the virtual exploration in the environment of another planetary surface. A map that the student is familiar with greatly helps estimating sizes and distances since it projects the known environment onto the planetary surface, virtually placing the student into a known 3D environment. To estimate the extent of features and distinct regions is therefore almost impossible on a planetary surface without a scale. Estimating sizes and distances on planetary surfaces is a difficult task on spacecraft imagery because of the lack of familiar landmarks of known sizes, the ubiquity of scale-independent landforms (craters, cracks, cones, dunes), and also due to the different radius of planets and satellites.
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