I think they announced an alpha Java front-end to CSPICE a while back, not sure where that's at right now or where to get it. Here's some documentation though:

ftp://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/misc/tmp...pice/index.html

FWIW, to date there isn't any rover pointing info available in the MSL SPICE kernels.

Hi all,

Another update, starting to get there:)

• Added the date/time from the JPL website, sorting on that column (=stereo images closer together)
• Reload button
• Social/sharing widget
• Styling (background can be switched off!)

This would be a good version to check-out.
What would the next "killer-feature" be? (image counts, sorting selection, file exports, stereo image bundeling, something else?)

Link: http://msl-raw-images.appspot.com/lists.html

Greetings,
Ludo.

This is awesome. Since you asked, the "killer app" would be the ability to tick checkboxes next to images of interest and then click one button to download them all. Not sure how that would work since you're not actually hosting the images but it's what I love best about the PDS Rings Node's OPUS search tool. Next best thing would be to tick checkboxes and click one button that would spit out a text listing of the full URLs to the selected images, which I could then get with wget.

I never run out of feature ideas Good thing I'm not actually a programmer, I'd only produce bloatware that never got to market.

If I may suggest something, I think it would be critical to also have a database linking specific features and observations to specific documentation images. You have no idea of how many hours I have spent on MER trying to track images pertaining certain events because I did not have them indexed. With a larger science package and longer expected mission duration it will be a nightmare to keep everything organized on MSL.

Things I had been asked to trace were:

1) when was the first/last time some activity happened
2) how many timed did we do some activity
3) when did a specific event/anomaly happened
4) when was the anomaly resolved or a workaround put in place
5) find where and when did we cross a specific type of terrain
6) do we have images of a specific feature/location

These sort of things and you can extrapolate similar queries from the science perspective. Unfortunately, I'm not really a database guy so I do not have specific suggestions on how to handle this, but the sooner we start keeping track of things the better we are off. Even if later on we need to transition to other methods or architectures I think it is best
to start doing something now. What do you guys (and gals) think?

Paolo

This retrieval system is great but for me the links to B & W images (nav cams etc) don't work I get an error message XML has no style information.
any idea if I've got my settings wrong.

Roy F

I added an RSS feed for the latest released images. Click on the icon at the top of the image listing

curiositymsl.com

I like it a lot. One thing I think would be nice to add would be to select by camera type --- that is, for navcam, show both L & R images from navcam, rather than selecting just L navcam or R navcam. Likewise for Mastcam.

I posted an update (http://www.clarkandersen.com/RangeFinder.htm ), which mostly fixes the installer problem with the last version -- the link to APG under Start/Programs Menu now successfully starts the program since I included the associated DLL in that location, but it still throws-up an error message because it's missing the MER image database (so I'll need to install a copy in the same location to fix that), but this has no bearing on images from MSL, just irritating. I'm sure there's a more efficient solution, but I'm no Installer guru -- these days my VC++ skills are atrophying as I spend most of my time with R. You might be happier with your own shortcut to the Program Files directory version of the executable, since it won't throw-up a warning message.

Since that requires a lot of analysis and input by people, the first thing that comes to mind is some kind of photo-tagging system a la flickr. It's a lot of work to come up with meaningful and comprehensive tags, so crowdsourcing would be the way to go? Of course then there's the issue of consistency, etc.

I thought it was a little surprising how JPL described the process of the team mapping the quadrangles (like "Yellowknife"). They said they farmed out the quadrangles individually to "volunteers" who marked up the various kinds of terrain. For one thing, why "volunteers" rather than just a team tasked to do that job? Also, wouldn't there be inconsistency in how people interpret the HiRISE images? But I guess such crowdsourcing works, given a population of motivated people.

My impression was they gave the task to "scientists" who at that point did not have much to do.............
As for inconsistancy, thats why you have a Chief Project Scientist, he has the final say.....

That is exactly it. I'm not sure what the instructions were but the idea was to look at interesting features in each quadrant.

Paolo

Somebody will have to talk with the MSL website people, their Sol=0 page is now >150.000 lines long and still growing. (>1.5MB text by now) I'm running into severe problems parsing the document in an automated system.....

Anyway, Sol 10 pictures have arrived, including chem-cam images!

grz,
Ludo.

Since the image filenames do not contain sequence IDs, I was thinking there would need to be some crowdsourced way of grouping images together. It would also be nice to be able to tag images with specific named targets or features as we learn them. This sounds complicated to develop though; it's somewhere between a database and a wiki.

Regarding the mapping, it's a familiar activity to a group of geologists -- you do it professionally, you start doing it in field camp while you're still a student, to divvy up a region into quads and then individuals map their quads and then they put the map together after and then they fight about their identifications. Grotzinger told me he was pleased with how much agreement there was between adjacent quads after this activity was over. One thing it does is makes sure that each area has been really closely examined by somebody; each neighborhood has a local guide.

I've sent an email to Michelle Viotti about the whitespace problem; I'll let you know if she responds.

Emily, if you're in contact with Michelle, could you ask her to put the time in to the Last Updated notice on the raws page? This one: "Last Updated: 08/16/2012 UTC". It's a little hard to tell when new images dropped. You have to memorize the count of images last time, instead.

I figure it's more constructive for one person to deliver requests than all of us to pile on the poor lady. Of course, don't let me nominate you for this if you don't want to do it.

Perhaps obvious, but this would be another area where metadata would be useful. Surely the data exists to tie the MSSS rawids to timecode, observation ID, observation description, et cetra; we just don't have access to it.