Interactive analysis of mantle convection in planets and moons
The heat build-up in planets is strongly influenced by the way heat is transported from the interior to the surface. To better understand what is referred to as thermal and chemical convection, scientists use numerical simulations. However, a subsequent analysis with current software tools is often time-consuming and thus expensive. This is mainly due to the enormous amounts of data that the analysis requires.
For this purpose, DLR presents the open-source software ‘CosmoScout VR’ – a virtual 3D rendering of the Solar System. The software is capable of displaying huge datasets about entire moons and planets in great detail. The ‘RayPC’ plug-in makes it possible to visualise large simulation datasets for Earth’s interior and exterior as well as other rocky planets in the Solar System. This provides users with an interactive and explorative analysis of the simulation data. For this purpose, a high-performance ray-tracing method has been implemented for the volume display and linked with a parallel coordinate diagram. In this way, rising and sinking movements of cold and hot material in Earth’s mantle can be visualised in an impressive way. The parallel coordinate diagram enables an efficient and interactive selection of sub-areas in high-dimensional data. This selection is then displayed within the 3D view.
To provide users with further contextual information, the simulation data can be combined with high-resolution surface data such as satellite images. This should allow conclusions to be drawn about tectonic structures such as faults, mountains, horizontal plate movements or volcanoes.
‘CosmoScout VR’ supports modern input and output devices so that both a conventional desktop computer and VR headsets can be used for the analysis.
Links:
- The open-source software CosmoScout VR can be found here: https://github.com/cosmoscout/cosmoscout-vr
- The analysis of mantle convections is being pursued as a use case in the DLR project ‘VisPlore’. In this digitalisation project, a platform for the analysis of large scientific datasets is to be created. Further information on the project can be found here: https://www.dlr.de/EN/research/digitalisation_node.html
German Aerospace Center (DLR)
Institute for Software Technology
Markus Flatken · Email markus.flatken@dlr.de
Visualisation of Earth’s mantle convection in CosmoScout VR