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Welcome to the PANGU portal. This site contains resources for ESA users of the PANGU software: STAR-Dundee customers should go to their product support page instead.

You must log in with an existing account before you can download PANGU, report a problem or manage your licence keys. Users working on ESA projects can get an account on this site by completing the licence key request form: a login will be created if accepted. Non-ESA users can contact STAR-Dundee to purchase PANGU with technical support via their site.

The Wiki pages can be accessed without logging in.

PANGU Lunar bouldered surface with Hapke BRDF
A lunar surface generated by PANGU with Hapke BRDF

PANGU is a powerful set of tools for modelling the surfaces of planetary bodies such as Mars, the Moon, Mercury and asteroids using real and synthetic data. It has the ability to generate visual, thermal infrared, LiDAR and RADAR images from any position and orientation. These images can be used for off-line and closed-loop simulations of planetary landing, surface roving and in-orbit rendezvous operations. The position and orientation of the camera, the Sun and other bodies can be specified directly for each image or obtained via SPICE kernels using just the date and time of interest.

Side-by-side comparison of PANGU (left) and VMC (right) images of Mars
PANGU simulation (left) of the Mars Express VMC image (right) acquired on 27-05-2010 at 09:13:01 showing Phobos at the end of its transit of Mars (the dark spot at the bottom)

PANGU is designed to provide a high degree of realism while operating at near real-time speeds on modern desktop PCs with graphics cards that support OpenGL 3.0 and programmable GPU shaders. A selection of videos of a various different scenarios created using PANGU can be found on the videos page (contains links to YouTube).

A three page brochure about PANGU (PDF) provides a summary of key features.

The paper Planetary surface image generation for testing future space missions with PANGU (PDF) was presented at the 2nd RPI Space Imaging Workshop in Saratoga Springs, NY (28-30 October 2019).