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Yes, would be nice but because the following would represent a really huge work with lot's of knowledge needed to achieve it, I don't think I'll see something like this one day; at least the idea worth (I think) to be write down...

Imagine an addon showing the state of the human knowledge concerning bodies surfaces... You could begin with a white sphere (unknown body at the time), then add a just a color, then the limit of knowledge maps would change on each crucial dates with new data added...

It would be fantastic to see in accelerated time the evolution of our knowledge...

You mean something like this?



I made this animation of the Iapetus map from Steve Albers' page. I visit his site regularly and save every improvements to his maps, so the evolution of his map become visible.

Exactly! The exercise is quite interesting and reveal here some strangeness in the placement of the pieces of the puzzle depending on the dtae; I suppose some more precise approach could show a "smooth" evolution of the map...
Anyway, well done!

I'm very excited regarding this possibility, though I fear it would cause an explosion in size of my already large extras folder.

BTW, something like this probably lines up nicely with the Object Timeline proposal from the Developer Talk section

ElChristou wrote:The exercise is quite interesting and reveal here some strangeness in the placement of the pieces of the puzzle depending on the dtae

I imagine this may happen often, particularly in objects mapped in a piecemeal a manner. To get the mappings precise one needs to have a good understanding of...

a) Position of the object at time of shot.
a) Shape of object (possibly at time of shot).
b) Position of spacecraft taking shot.
c) Position of camera on spacecraft
d) Settings of camera on spacecraft
e) An understanding of any image preprocessing (clipping, color correction, etc)

...given all that one can understand why lining things up by eye using shared geometry (i.e. overlapping sections of craters, or other color variations) is likely the more prevalent technique.

The work Toti is doing with animated textures would be useful here as well
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