PE&RS September 2009

The cover page of this issue shows a shaded relief perspective view with color-coded heights generated from a Mars digital terrain model of the Mawrth Vallis area. The area is located at the southern border of the northern lowlands of the planet, and has been selected as one of the fi nal four candidate landing sites for NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover mission. The area is thought to represent an ancient aqueous geological environment on early Mars that may have been suitable for life.

The terrain model has been produced from stereo data of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) onboard ESA’s Mars Express mission. HRSC is the fi rst sensor system with built-in stereo capabilities that has been included in a planetary orbiter mission. The model has been derived from 19 adjacent imaging tracks by automated procedures that include standardized quality checks, but no interactive measurements or data editing procedures (see peer-reviewed article in this issue for details on HRSC and related processing methodology). The raster model has a resolution of 50 m/pxl and covers a total area of about 0.8 million km2. Mapping products of this type will be important tools for defi ning the regional context of the local fi ndings achieved by the rover mission.

The area shown is about 100 km wide in the foreground, about 450 km wide in the background. North is to the left, vertical exaggeration is by factor 4. The terrain model has been produced at the Institute of Planetary Research of the German Aerospace Center (DLR; www.dlr.de, contact: Klaus.Gwinner@dlr.de).

Highlight Article
1030 Mapping and Estimation of Phosphorus and Copper Concentrations in Fly Ash Spill Area using LANDSAT TM Images
JB. B. Maruthi Sridhar and Robert K. Vincent

Announcement
1042 NOAA National Geodetc Survey
1053 2010 Annual Conference— Opportunities for Emerging Geospatial Technologies

Columns & Updates
1035 Las Specification: Version 1.3 – R10 (Adobe PDF 462Kb)
1043 Grids and Datums — Republic of Equatorial Guinea (Adobe PDF 275Kb)
1045 Book Review — Land Use Scenarios: Environmental Consequences of Development (Adobe PDF 241Kb)
1047 Reflection of the Past (Adobe PDF 205Kb)
1049 Headquarters News—

1049 Report on the 30th Canadian Symposium on Remote Sensing: Bridging Excellence (Adobe PDF 132Kb)
Russ Congalton
1050 Nathaniel J. Ovans Named First Provisional Certified Photogrammetrist by ASPRS (Adobe PDF 84Kb)
1050 The ASPRS Films Committee Needs You! (Adobe PDF 84Kb)

1051 Industry News

Departments
1034 New Members
1034 Certification List
1044 Advertiser Index
1048 Region of the Month
1054 Who’s Who in ASPRS
1055 Sustaining Members
1057 Instructions for Authors
1068 Forthcoming Articles
1082 ASPRS Member Champions (Adobe PDF 354Kb)
1118 Calendar
1143 Professional Directory
1144 Membership Application

Peer-Reviewed Articles (Click the linked titles to see the full abstract)

1059 A Fast Approach to Best Scanline Search of Airborne Linear Pushbroom Images
Mi Wang, Fen Hu, Jonathan Li, and Jun Pan

A fast method for best scanline search of airborne linear pushbroom images based on the object-space geometric constraints.

1069 Mapping Banana Plantations from Object-oriented Classification of SPOT-5 Imagery
Kasper Johansen, Stuart Phinn, Christian Witte, Seonaid Philip, and Lisa Newton

The extent of banana plantations was mapped using panchromatic and multispectral SPOT-5 imagery and object-oriented segmentation and classification in Definiens Professional 5.

1083 A Generic Method for RPC Refinement Using Ground Control Information
Zhen Xiong and Yun Zhang

A newly developed Generic method for Rational Polynomial Coefficient refinement focusing on a comparison between the Bias Compensation method.

1093 Error Budget of Lidar Systems and Quality Control of the Derived Data
Ayman Habib, Ki In Bang, Ana Paula Kersting, and Dong- Cheon Lee

A new methodology for the quality control of lidar data while circumventing the problems associated with existing methods.

1109 The Effect of Prior Probabilities in the Maximum Likelihood Classification on Individual Classes: A Theoretical Reasoning and Empirical Testing
Zheng Mingguo, Cai Qianguo, and Qin Mingzhou

How prior probabilities affect the MLC discrimination process and to investigate the effect of prior probabilities on individual classes.

1119 Impact of Imaging Geometry on 3D Geopositioning Accuracy of Stereo Ikonos Imagery
Rongxing Li, Xutong Niu, Chun Liu, Bo Wu, and Sagar Deshpande

A special experiment and investigation proves the high impact of stereo imaging geometry on geopositioning accuracy.

1127 Derivation and Validation of High-Resolution Digital Terrain Models from Mars Express HRSC-Data
Klaus Gwinner, Frank Scholten, Michael Spiegel, Ralph Schmidt, Bernd Giese, Jürgen Oberst, Christian Heipke, Ralf Jaumann, and Gerhard Neukum

The methodology and procedures for the derivation of highresolution DTMs from data of the Mars Express High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) by the experiment team, and report on related processing test series and quality assessment.