Printing the planets on a 3D printer?

I have been thinking about printing the planets and our moon on a 3D
printer. Does anybody know where I can find the "raw data" to feed the
printer? Perhaps it would be best to make every mountain 10 times
higher than in the real world on the printout. How would this be done?

DK

In article
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Dean Keaton wrote:

I have been thinking about printing the planets and our moon on a 3D
printer. Does anybody know where I can find the "raw data" to feed the
printer?

That would depend on how the printer represents objects. But if you have
3-D modelling software to drive it, that can build a spheroid, some
basic dimensional data are he

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/planetfact.html

Perhaps it would be best to make every mountain 10 times
higher than in the real world on the printout. How would this be done?

Making relief globes obviously requires a lot more data! If you can
convert a coloured or shaded image to a height-map or texture and wrap
it around a spheroid (taking into account the map projection
represented), I'm sure there are suitable maps of at least the Earth,
Mars, and the Moon available (e.g. from the USGS). Radar-survey images
of the inner planets could also be similarly treated.

(Disclaimer: I have only a passing acquaintance with 3-D applications,
and couldn't begin to say how this is actually done with a given
program.)

You'd definitely have to increase the altitude scale for the relief to
be noticeable. On a 1:10^8 model of the Earth (about 13 cm in diameter)
even the Hawaiian Islands would stand only about 0.1 mm above the floor
of the Pacific. To make any but the most extreme features noticeable
you'd probably have to exaggerate them by a factor of at least fifty:
for example this would make the Alps or the Rockies about 1 mm higher
than the surrounding terrain at that sort of scale.

Olympus Mons is said to be the biggest mountain in the solar system, but
even so it would be a barely discernable lump on a Mars-globe without
considerable exaggeration.

How big is the printer, and what is its resolution? If your models are
all rendered at the same scale, small enough to make Jupiter a practical
size, it's likely that none of the rocky bodies will be large enough to
depict much surface detail at all, or even their asphericity
(flattening).

--
Odysseus