
Home	Definition	CMEX Mars	Legal & Licensing	Contact

Home of the Martian Area Coding System

Mars is a fascinating planet for scientists, because it is similar enough to Earth that it may reveal a great deal about the early history of our planet. There are many questions about Mars puzzling us: What were early conditions on Mars like? How similar to Earth? For how long was liquid water available at the surface and how far did chemical evolution proceed? Where is all the water today? Did life ever evolve and, if so, did it succumb to the cold desert climate that Mars now has or did it retreat to niches yet to be identified?

We want to know the answers to these questions because they are not simply of academic interest -- the need to understand our place in the universe has been a challenge to philosophers throughout the ages. We may even consider the possibility to immigrate to Mars in the future.

Mars is like Earth with huge amount of data that we have to collect, store, retrieve and analyze. The technologies to optimize these massive data are in developing or to be develop. However, we have to learn a lesson from Earth on which people have established very innefficient methods to represent areas and locations which have severely blocked the introduction of GPS technologies used in daily lives.

What we have now in representing locations and areas are two options: one is to use conventional addresses and place names, and the other is to use geographic coordinates such as longitude/latitude, UTM, etc. Using conventional addresses and place names to specify locations and areas has limitations: they are not available everywhere in the world (actually, conventional addresses are available at less than 1% of locations in the world) and are also language dependent. Using longitude/latitude to specify locations is blocked by the difficulties of long digits that are nearly useless to consumers (actually, consumers never use these geographic coordinates directly).

These problems have created huge inconvenience for consumers to use GIS (rely mainly on longitude/latitude coordinates), GPS (rely on digital maps that are difficult to remember and communicate) and printed street maps (rely on street indexes that are not related to geographic coordinates). Although, a very efficient system called the Natural Area Coding System has been introduced to unify all addresses, geographic coordinates, area codes and postal codes, it will take quite a long time for consumers to adopt it.

As the information from Mars is quickly reaching Earth, people should avoid the problems right at this very beginning. Therefore, we developed a system called the Martian Area Coding System - a clone of the Natural Area Coding System. With this system, every area or location (even a 3D space block) on Mars can be uniquely represented with one unified and highly efficient code called Martian Area Code (MAC). A MAC can used as an accurate address for any spots on Mars, as an area code to retrieve its map or make a location based search in an area, and can be directly pinpointed on all maps with Martian Map Grids.

If we start using the Martian Area Coding System now, we will make all the location information highly efficient, consistent, connected and optimized.