Planetary Data System

The Planetary Data System is an open archive where NASA organizes the data captured and measured by its spacecraft and orbiters, making it available for anyone to pull and use. Things like laser measurements of the Moon's surface elevation or surface photographs don't disappear once a mission ends — they pile up in this archive, ready for researchers or developers to download whenever they need them.

What matters is that this data is raw, unprocessed observational data. It's not a polished, ready-made image like you'd get from a map service — it's raw numbers and coordinates, so reconstructing terrain and calculating routes from it is left up to whoever downloads it. That means how well someone interprets this data ends up determining the quality of the final result.

The article notes, "Both sets of data are reportedly sourced from NASA's public database, PDS (Planetary Data System)." Here, it's important not to confuse PDS with a finished product like a map or app — it's a repository where raw observational data is stored. The navigation app built by Claude is the result of pulling data from this archive and independently reconstructing terrain and calculating routes.