Rover visualization and other apps, For discussions of ways to view and understand the mission Options

[ChrisC]

Hey all, i'm the person responsible for the elaborate hack that is called Marslife. Thank you very much for this thread! I would like to take this opportunity to present the latest enhancement to the website; every Perseverance image that came down as L & R stereopair can now be viewed as anaglyph!

Thank you so much for doing this! Anaglyphs are my main way of doing my (extremely modest) outreach efforts.

But you forgot to link to the website, perhaps assuming everyone already knew. Doh

----> marslife.org

[Andreas Plesch]

https://bit.ly/PercyMAP updated to latest drive; the waypoint geojson changed a bit this time (no lat, lon properties anymore). I really hope the formats stabilize.

[Andreas Plesch]

https://bit.ly/PercyMAP updated to include approximate animations of flights four and five. The spin up/down blade animation is now out of sync but the animations gave me a better appreciation of how long these flights really were. One has to zoom out quite a bit to see the complete flights, and little Ingenuity just keeps going and going. I will refine the timing and blade synchronization.

Further updated so Ingenuities altitude now scales with with the vertical exaggeration of the terrain for a better comparison. Scale down 1x v.e. to see the real altitude. Also improved the timing a bit.

Also, now rover (finally) uses and follows elevation data from traverse geojson or interpolated from waypoints geojson, for any v.e.

[Andreas Plesch]

Minor updates to https://bit.ly/PercyMAP : improved help, wider initial view, additional waypoint links to relevant content.

[Andreas Plesch]

https://bit.ly/PercyMAP updated to work with latest traverse json which has a small typo for the last drive: fromRMC is "2_2430" but should be "3_2430" as far as I can tell. I think the json generation may not be fully automated.

It appears that the elevation data in the traverse json for the last drive is slightly lower than the elevations in the HiRISE DEM. That is why the rover sinks a little bit into the ground in the drive animation.

It is interesting that the RMC counter reset after the last drive to a new first digit (project phase?), from 3 to 4. The current way point has now a RMC of "4_0". It could signify a new project phase starting from the current way point.

[Greenish]

The RMC has a Site counter that updates each time the local working coordinate origin is reset. See "2.1.2. Site Frame" in this MSL doc for details on how it relates to the Nav Frame, Local Level frame, etc..

[Andreas Plesch]

The RMC has a Site counter that updates each time the local working coordinate origin is reset. See "2.1.2. Site Frame" in this MSL doc for details on how it relates to the Nav Frame, Local Level frame, etc..

Thanks, that's it:

2.2.1. Site Index
The Site index defines which instance of the Site frame is relevant for this RMC. Whenever the Site
frame is incremented, all the other RMC values are set to 0. Declaring a new Site frame thus resets
all motions and creates a new local area in which to work.

We are in a new local work area.

[djellison]

Thanks, that's it:

We are in a new local work area.

The resetting of the site index is usually triggered by an accumulation of time on the rover's IMU and thus an accumulation of inaccuracy in the rovers attitude knowledge - not some geographic or scientific reason. On MSL that IMU time comes in to something like a couple of hundred meters of driving.

You will see this site increment accompanied by a Navcam solar image used as part of that process - such as https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/r...PP00601_00_2LLJ for M2020 or https://mars.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/m...SAPP07612M_.JPG on MSL

[Andreas Plesch]

The resetting of the site index is usually triggered by an accumulation of time on the rover's IMU and thus an accumulation of inaccuracy in the rovers attitude knowledge - not some geographic or scientific reason. On MSL that IMU time comes in to something like a couple of hundred meters of driving.

You will see this site increment accompanied by a Navcam solar image used as part of that process - such as https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/r...PP00601_00_2LLJ for M2020 or https://mars.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/proj/m...SAPP07612M_.JPG on MSL

Makes sense. The "new local area in which to work" just refers to spatial referencing work.

[Andreas Plesch]

In anticipation of flight 6, I updated https://bit.ly/PercyMAP with a slightly improved landing location in air field B, and a button to switch to the helicopter's view perspective as it is flying. Zooming in and out still works while flying.

The flight paths are pretty accurate but the changes in view orientations are just proof of concept to provide a sense what the helicopter sees.

With flight 6 it will be time to make a new base map since the trip will go beyond what is currently shown. It could be just an addition, or a shifted map to save resources since I want to maintain the DEM as high resolution as possible.

[Andreas Plesch]

Here is a quick bookmarklet to extract the Urls of full images from whatever thumbnails are currently shown on the raw image site:

CODE

java script:(function(){s=[];document.querySelector(".raw_images_list").querySelectorAll("img").forEach(img=>s.push(img.src.replace("_320.jpg",".png")));var w=window.open();w.document.write("<small>"+s.join(" ")+"</small>");w.document.close();})()

Since the forum does not allow javascript urls, the easiest way to "install" is to navigate to:

https://andreasplesch.github.io/Mars2020/bo...actRawUrls.html

and drag the link to the location bar or to the bookmarks folder. You can edit the bookmark to see the code or change the name.

When clicked a new window or tab opens with all the urls listed. The intended use is then to select all (ctrl-a) and paste as a list of urls after a wget command line to download all. So far no escaping of special characters was necessary.
Command lines can be pretty long, so this should work for a lot of urls. Otherwise paste into a file and use wget -i.

This allows using all the options to filter on the raw image site, for example movie frames, and now helicopter images. Since there is still a bit of typing and work involved to actually download, hopefully this little tool is still acceptable for the Nasa servers.

Updated to open a window instead of an alert since alerts can only show a very limited amount of text.

[Andreas Plesch]

With flight 6 it will be time to make a new base map since the trip will go beyond what is currently shown. It could be just an addition, or a shifted map to save resources since I want to maintain the DEM as high resolution as possible.

https://bit.ly/PercyMAP was updated to accommodate changes in the rover json (no more 3d coordinates). This has now the effect that the rover drives off the map. Clearly. time to update the base map. Or perhaps a good opportunity to start over and refactor which would be very needed.

[Ryan Kinnett]

If you have a VR headset (ideally Oculus Quest), check out Perseverance in virtual reality! You can teleport yourself and the rover anywhere around the delta region, drive the rover, and unstow the arm, all with audio recorded either on Mars or in JPL testbed.

https://rkinnett.github.io/marsroVR

[PaulH51]

Has anyone here found an App or utility for range finding and/or scaling targets close to the rover by using a stereo pair?

[neo56]

For those who would be interested, I have coded in Python (and in the good old IDL) the algorithms to compute Ls, LMST, LTST and elevation / azimuth of the Sun for a given time in UTC and latitude/longitude: https://github.com/thomasappere/MarsTime_PositionSun

This work is partly based on routines written by Aymeric Spiga, a planetary scientist in Paris with who I worked during my PhD.
I checked my outputs with the results given by Mars24 and there is a very good match.