An intuitive software framework for visualizing the solar wind ion data from Chang'E-1 lunar orbiter

Chang'E-1 is the first Chinese unmanned lunar orbiter which contains eight sets of payloads including two solar wind ion detectors as one set of them. These solar wind ion detectors had obtained tens of gigabytes of solar wind ion data, which are very important for analyzing the lunar plasma environment. It is expected that an intuitive visualization tool would significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the analysis of these data. In this paper, we present an intuitive soft-ware framework for visualizing the solar wind ion data obtained from Chang'E-1 lunar orbiter. There are three display windows in the software framework, providing the current position of the orbiter related to the Moon, the energy bounds, and the volume rendered image of the solar wind data, respectively. Experimental results show that our software framework can effectively provide space scientists useful information of the solar wind ion data in an intuitive manner. © 2011 IEEE.