The Solar System Treks Mosaic Pipeline (SSTMP)

Solar System Treks Mosaic Pipeline (SSTMP) is a new, open-source tool for generation of planetary DEM and orthoimage mosaics. Opportunistic stereo reconstruction from pre-existing orbital imagery has in the past typically required significant human input, particularly in the pair selection and spatial alignment steps. Previous stereo mosaics incorporate myriad human decisions, compromising the reproducibility of the process and complicating uncertainty analysis. Lack of a common framework for recording operator input has hindered the community's ability to collaborate and share experience to improve stereo reconstruction techniques. SSTMP provides a repeatable, turnkey, end-to-end solution for creating these products. The user requests mosaic generation for a bounding box or polygon, initiating a workflow which results in deliverable mosaics usable for site characterization, science, and public outreach.

The inital release of SSTMP focuses on production of elevation and orthoimage mosaics using data from the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter's Narrow Angle Camera (LRO NAC). SSTMP can automatically select viable stereo pairs, complete stereo reconstruction, refine alignments using data from the LRO's laser altimeter (LOLA), and combine the data to produce orthoimage, elevation, and color hillshade mosaics.

SSTMP encapsulates the entire stereo mosaic production process into one workflow, managed by Argo Workflow opensource Kubernetes-based software. Each process runs in a container including all tools necessary for production and geospatial analysis of mosaics, ensuring a consistent computing environment. SSTMP automatically retrieves all necessary data. For processing steps, it leverages free and open-source software including Ames Stereo Pipeline, USGS ISIS, Geopandas, GDAL, and Orfeo toolbox.