Do you have an interest in making digital maps of the planets? If so, the two biggest software competitors today are Esri’s ArcGIS, a proprietary solution, and Quantum GIS, an open-source solution. Although both can do most of anything you would need for a planetary project, there are advantages and disadvantages to both, depending on what you want to accomplish.

In the June 2023 Astrogator, I contributed an article that discussed the software options for creating a digital map of the Moon and Mars. I mentioned a system of planetary addresses based on low slope routes and quadrangles. One additional consideration is the creation of nomenclature guidelines to help inform the names of the newly charted planetary roads. We have a historical precedent in the creation of the first lunar map with named features by Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Francesco Maria Grimaldi in 1651, about 50 years after the invention of the telescope.

How many miles of planetary roads would we need on the Moon and Mars? I’ve estimated ~190K miles of roads on the Moon and ~280K miles on Mars. On Earth, roadbotics companies provide a service to governments around the world to objectively manage their road networks using artificial intelligence. In space, roadbotics might include autonomous rovers that are better, faster and cheaper with only one purpose: to leave their tracks for future explorers. Some of the Mars rovers leave their names in the tracks. In the image above, holes in Curiosity’s tire treads spell out JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) in Morse code.