Mercury Globe 5x in 516,000 Facets

thingiverse

The Mercury Messenger Spacecraft mapped half of Mercury and sent the elevation data to The Planetary Data System. I got their files and made a 3D model. Data points are there every half degree of longitude and latitude. The elevations are exaggerated 5 times. The globe is 5.5 inches at sea level. Peaks are bigger. TARGET_NAME = MERCURY START_TIME = 2008-01-14 STOP_TIME = 2012-09-17 PRODUCT_CREATION_TIME = 2012-10-31 PRODUCT_RELEASE_DATE = 2013-03-08 PRODUCER_ID = MESSENGER_MLA_TEAM PRODUCER_FULL_NAME = "DAVID E. SMITH" PRODUCER_INSTITUTION_NAME = "NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER" Instructions The Mercury data is available for you here:http://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/messenger/mess-e_v_h-mla-3_4-cdr_rdr-data-v1/messmla_2001/gdr/img/ That digital elevation data was used to make my Mercury Globe 3D model files in .stl format. I wrote a Perl program to make .stl files : like this program for Mercury: $ivec = ($[4]-$[1])*($[8]-$[2])-($[5]-$[2])*($[7]-$_[1]); $jvec = ($[5]-$[2])*($[6]-$[0])-($[3]-$[0])*($[8]-$_[2]); $kvec = ($[3]-$[0])*($[7]-$[1])-($[4]-$[1])*($[6]-$_[0]); $magnitude_squared = $i_vec$i_vec + $j_vec$j_vec + $k_vec*$k_vec;