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Home of the Lunar Area Coding System
Moon is the most fascinating oject in the sky that has stimulated so many
imaginations in our human history. How many people believed that Moon
was a paradise and dreamed to live there! Many people even dream of space
traveling to distant planets not in our solar system as time could be expanded
in fast moving rockets. Unfortunately,
Einstein's time dilation has been proved impossible.
Moon is the largest object that we see in the sky. It has a close relationship
with Earth. Almost all calendars in the world use the motion of Moon
as a measure of a standard time period. Moon pulls the water in oceans
on Earth to form tides. For scientists, the study of Moon may reveal a great
deal about the history of our planet. There are many questions about Moon
puzzling us: What were early conditions on Moon like? Like Earth, there is
ice on Moon. Are there any lives there now or were there ever any lives
existing there. Are there any special
minerals there? Can Moon be used as science and research laboratories? Can
we set up permenant colonies there? Are there any commercial value in
exploring and developing Moon?
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 histories.
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Moon 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 developed. 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 Moon is quickly reaching Earth, people should avoid the
problems right at this very beginning. Therefore, we developed a system called
the Lunar Area Coding System - a clone of
the Natural Area Coding System. With
this system, every area or location (even a 3D space block) on Moon can be
uniquely represented with one unified and highly efficient code called Lunar
Area Code (LAC). A LAC can be used as an accurate address for any spots on Moon,
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 Lunar Map Grids.
If we start using the Lunar Area Coding System now, we will make all the
location information highly efficient, consistent, connected and optimized.
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Copyright © 2004, NAC Geographic Products Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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