The iridescent blues, greens, and yellows of the map's color palette evoke a sense of vitality, suggesting not only the play of light in the polar regions but also the refractive lunar maria where future space mining activities may flourish. Between the flyouts and the globe, the sky is pale gray, suggesting incident radiation, or the albedo effect. The repeated theme of illumination, with stars twinkling in the background and brighter areas on the gray globe, reinforces the significance of light for enabling life beyond Earth.

Quadrangles define regions on planetary bodies, but only a small subset have been named. The name is essential for my framework in that it defines the equivalent of a “city” or a “state.” The numerical astronomical charts are the equivalent of a “zip code.” A planetary address is a numerical identifier + a named planetary road + a named quadrangle + a numerical astronomical chart + the planetary body.

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 either 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.

I spent the pandemic in Carmel Valley, walking distance to Del Mar, one of the most spectacular beaches in San Diego. It was during the lockdown that I finally found the time to transcribe my father’s stories, mostly typewritten, with comments handwritten in red and green pencil by Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22. It was a well-timed experience, as I was feeling lost and adrift in an environment that didn’t make much sense for me. It was a grounding experience, and wonderful to hear his voice again after so many years.

Dave Ellas was also a character in a story called Ono. Ono was completely handwritten, whereas the other stories were typed. Comments from Joseph Heller were written in green and red pencil in the margins of some of the stories, but there were no comments on Ono. My best guess is that the story was written while my father was a student in Dr. Christie's class, who took over teaching English Composition after Heller started writing Catch-18 in 1953.

The year was 1952 and Dwight David Eisenhower was elected President of the United States in November, beating Governor Adlai Stevenson. My father, David Ellsworth Eskey, was a student at Penn State at the time, learning to write fiction from his English Composition teacher, Joseph Heller. Heller would later go on to write Catch-22.. Heller had by then introduced my father to his literary agent, Elizabeth McKee. Mavis McIntosh and Elizabeth McKee had started their own agency, and had advised my father to keep working on his stories, which showed promise, but were still too "fragmentary" to be marketable, in their estimation. The Madams McIntosh and McKee represented the likes of Flannery O’Connor, John Irving, John Steinbeck, and Edna O’Brien, so Heller and my father were in very good company.