Quadrilateralized spherical cube

In mapmaking, a quadrilateralized spherical cube, or quad sphere for short, is an equal-area polyhedral map projection and discrete global grid scheme for data collected on a spherical surface (either that of the Earth or the celestial sphere). It was first proposed in 1975 by Chan and O'Neill for the Naval Environmental Prediction Research Facility. This scheme is also often called the COBE sky cube, because it was designed to hold data from the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) project.