Appropriate environmental sensing methods and visualization representations are crucial foundations for the in situ exploration of planets. In this paper, we developed specialized visualization methods to facilitate the rover's interaction and decision-making processes, as well as to address the path-planning and obstacle-avoidance requirements for lunar polar region exploration and Mars exploration. To achieve this goal, we utilize simulated lunar polar regions and Martian environments. Among them, the lunar rover operating in the permanently shadowed region (PSR) of the simulated crater primarily utilizes light detection and ranging (LiDAR) for environmental sensing; then, we reconstruct a mesh using the Poisson surface reconstruction method. After that, the lunar rover's traveling environment is represented as a red-green-blue (RGB) image, a slope coloration image, and a theoretical water content coloration image, based on different interaction needs and scientific objectives. For the rocky environment where the Mars rover is traveling, this paper enhances the display of the rocks on the Martian surface. It does so by utilizing depth information of the rock instances to highlight their significance for the rover's path-planning and obstacle-avoidance decisions. Such an environmental sensing and enhanced visualization approach facilitates rover path-planning and remote-interactive operations, thereby enabling further exploration activities in the lunar PSR and Mars, in addition to facilitating the study and communication of specific planetary science objectives, and the production and display of basemaps and thematic maps.

NASAs Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will be the first robotic mission to prospect for water ice near the south pole of the Moon in late 2023 on a 100 Earth-day mission. The information that the VIPER rover provides will help improve understanding of the composition, distribution, and accessibility of Lunar polar volatiles and will help determine howthe Moons resources can support future human space exploration. VIPER, however, represents a radical departure from the way that NASA has traditionally developed planetary robotic missions. A key consequence of these differences is that estimating the cst of VIPERs rover software is challenging and complex. For example, VIPER is being developed using management procedures typically applied to NASA research and technology projects, rather than space flight programs. In addition, key portions of the rovers software are being designed as ground software to run on mission control computers (rather than on board the rover as flight software as with prior planetary missions) taking advantage of continuous, interactive data communications between the Moon and Earth and higher performance computing available on the ground. Moreover, the rovers software is being engineered using Agile software development practices and incorporates a significant amount of open-source code rather than following traditional (spir al, waterfall, etc.) development methods and mouse code. In this paper, we present an innovative process to estimate the life cycle cost of VIPERs rover software. We first describe how we modeled the architecture and code counts for three software elements: Rover Flight Software (RFSW), Rover Ground Software (RGSW), and Rover Simulation Software (RSIM). We then discuss key challenges and unique aspects of our approach, such as the lack of Lunar rover analogies, the need to integrate and test large opersource software, and the strategie developed to account for use of nonspace flight management practices and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic We conclude with a summary of our results, including cumulative distribution, nearest neighbors and clusteanalysis, as well as heuristics used to confirm the reasonableness of the cost estimate.