Abstract:
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Atmospheric science is the study of the Earth’s atmosphere, its processes and the inter-actions with other atmospheres. However, it has been extended to the field of planetaryscience and the study of atmospheres of the planets of the solar system. In the same waythat the Earth’s atmosphere, the planetary atmospheres are affected by other atmospheresand by varying degrees of energy, leading to the formation of dynamic weather systems,such as the anticyclonic storm on Jupiter, called theGreat Red Spot[53]. In this way, theobjective of the scientists is to know the evolution of this storms by performing simulations.This study aims to process planetary images taken by interplanetary probes with theobjective of obtaining the longitudes and latitudes of the pixels, so that the locations ofthe meteorological phenomena are known and can serve as validation of simulations [2].For the cases studied, the images are in RAW format, i.e. as captured by the spacecraftcamera, and its image file format, called VICAR, was developed by the NASA’s JPL totransport images from space missions. The VICAR format predates the standard imageformats, such as PNG, TIF, FITS, among others, so it has been necessary to develop adecoder capable of reading and converting the images to the aforementioned conventionalformats.Thus, starting from specialized software in this field, such as PLIA [46, 9], the objectivehas been to understand the algorithms that it implements and develop an own programcapable of carrying them out, based on the the library SPICE developed by the NASA’sJPL. In this sense, until obtain the longitudes and latitudes of the images, an initialprogram has been developed capable of reading the original images (RAW) taken by theinterplanetary probes, optical distortions have been calibrated and corrected by specializedsoftware (CISSCAL), and a solver able to implement the navigation algorithms involvedin the PLIA code has been developed, which also estimates the navigation error for anautomatic adjustment.At the end of this study, the objectives have been achieved and the results have beencompared with the specialized software, obtaining satisfactory results. Looking ahead,more space missions can be tested, more specifically, the next objective is to focus on theJuno probe, which is presented as a challenge due to its operationality. |