THE PROJECT OF MULTILINGUAL MAPS SERIES ON CELESTIAL BODIES: CURRENT STATE AND NEAR FUTURE

Manfred F. Buchroithner², Bianna V. Krasnopevtseva¹, Kira B. Shingareva¹, Sergei M. Leonenko¹, Maria E. Fleis³, Philip Stooke⁴

1 - Moscow State University for Geodesy and Cartography, Moscow, Russia

2 - Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany

3 - Institute for Geography by Russian Academy of Science, Moscow, Russia

4 - University of Western Ontario, London, Canada

plan@miigaik.ru

Mapping of extraterrestrial territories is very useful for education on the field of extraterrestrial geography which being very active at the beginning of XXI century. One of the first projects which were carried in frames of Planetary Cartography Commission under ICA support since 1996 became project on development of the concept for a series of multilingual maps for Earth group planets and their moons. Development of some map series for various Earth regions and groups of languages was proposed. The nomenclature of relief features and their names is traditionally appropriated by International Astronomical Union (IAU) on Latin. It was proposed to give on maps a Latin version of names, and on the back of a map to place the corresponding information in 5 languages. This information, besides the terminology concerning relief forms, and their own names should include brief characteristics of a celestial body, data on surveying of a given body during space programs, and also the relativity figure accepted for it. The first series was made on the basis of Atlas for terrestrial group planets and their moons, published in Russia in 1992. Maps of a series contain the information in 5 languages, namely English, German, French, Spanish and Russian. Composition of maps is submitted by two hemispheres having the same size for all celestial bodies and accordingly various scales (fractional and approximated). The shaded relief is introduced, that emphasizes its originality. By present time the updated maps of all terrestrial planets and their moons, namely Mercury, Venus, Mars, the Moon, Phobos and Deimos are prepared and issued with their preliminary, and then finally versions after some corrections. Compiling of each map had some peculiarities which were taking into account both specificity of celestial body, and volume and quality of space surveying. There were developed two directions in this project: 1. Making the same map series, but with new groups of languages and 2.Dessiminating this idea for new groups of celestial bodies (giant-planets moons, asteroids). Today some results in both directions are present.

Keywords: extraterrestrial mapping, multilingual maps, celestial bodies