What is this?
This is a visualization of the nearly six billion measurement points of the NASA LOLA mission. LOLA was launched to capture high fidelity topographic modeling of the moon's surface to support things like data alignment and deciding where to land :)
Why is LOLA data a point cloud?
LOLA data was captured by a polar orbiting laser altimeter. Think of it like the range finder you would use to measure how far away the hole is from your current position at a golf course, except you press the button six billion times, save the position from where you are measuring, save every distance measurement on a hard drive, and then phone that data back to earth.
Who is Hobu?
Hobu, Inc. is a software consultancy in Iowa City, Iowa that has been writing open source software for point cloud data management for more than fifteen years. Along with PDAL, we developed the COPC specification to allow applications to optionally stream point cloud data using the most commonly available LAZ geospatial point cloud format.
Who made this website?
Connor Manning of Hobu, who led development of Entwine and COPC, developed a point cloud visualization and exploration interface based on CesiumJS called Eptium. moonlidar.com is an interface for exploring the global LOLA data in its entirety.
Why did you do this?
To see if we could ;)
Also, other global LiDAR datasets that are much larger in scope, such as ICESat-2, have similar data management challenges as LOLA. The lessons we've learned from building visualization and query capabilities with COPC for this dataset apply to those larger, richer datasets as well.
Where can I find out more?
Connor will be presenting about this at FOSS4GNA 2023 on October 25th, 2023 in Baltimore, Maryland. See here for the abstract.
Is Eptium open source too?
Nope.
Visit https://hobu.co/copc-viewer.html to find out more about how your organization can license Eptium to build its own point cloud data management solutions.