What to do after the closure of Midnight Mars Browser? Options

[paraisosdelsiste...]

I've been a heavy user of Midnight Mars Browser for several years and I'm incredibly grateful for the work that Michael has done.

Now I ask myself, should we create again an alternative way to look and search for images coming from Mars? In the last several months I developed a way to ingest InSight images in order to have a small database and a telegram bot that tells me when a new image is uploaded to the InSight web site and I can try to do the same with the MSL imagery.

But, I have several questions: What is the better way to show the data in the web page? Which is the best way to order the images?

I'd love to hear some suggestions for that.

Greetings.

[Phil Stooke]

I would suggest something that resembles the structure of MMB. I have found it very useful for years. Having access via a list of sols, and access to the previous and next sols, is great. And ordering images by time within a sol is very useful.

Phil

[PaulH51]

I would suggest something that resembles the structure of MMB. I have found it very useful for years. Having access via a list of sols, and access to the previous and next sols, is great. And ordering images by time within a sol is very useful.

Phil

Not sure how far you want to take this, but Joe Knapp's MSL image browser also had some very useful features, of the many features the one I used the most was the pointing data which Joe got from the mission NAIF service.

Good luck if you choose to create a browser

[fredk]

In addition to ordering by sols, ideally a page would also somehow allow you to know which images you haven't looked at yet, ie which are newly downlinked images. This can be as simple as including ordinary text links to the full size images (presumably on the jpl server) which the viewer's web browser will change the colour of once visited (as Joe's site does). Ie, you can let the browser's own history handle it.

The option to order by downlink time is very nice when very old images are finally downlinked, otherwise they may be many sols back and you might miss them.

Otherwise displaying the LMST and UTC of image capture, and UTC of downlink are important. Also displaying the full-res image size in pixels is nice, so you can tell if the image is just a subsampled thumb or not.

(And it goes without saying that the page should only load thumbs, not full-res that are rescaled by the browser, until you open the full-sized image! )

Thanks a lot for considering this, and best of luck!

[charborob]

Would it be very complicated to implement a function that would debayer the Mastcam images when we download them?

[fredk]

That would be a great feature to have. It would be easy to do a quck-and-dirty job (showing some green artifacts) if you could run something like gmic (runs on linux). But you would need server space to host the deBayered images.

[paraisosdelsiste...]

Thanks for all the suggestions!,

I'm thinking on creating two versions: a simple similar to Midnight Browser that was perfect for looking at the last downlinked imagery and a more complex one that allows searching (by Sol, by time of the day...).
I'm already doing some automatic debayering for the downlinked images. The program checks if the image is bayered and runs a debayering algorithm (there is still room for improvement in that point ). I know it will take some space on the server, but it is worth.

Thumbnails are quite useful for load times, right now I have this functionality implemented in the InSight image download code I'm using.

Of course, the viewer should allow to see the downlink time and when the image was taken in Mars and Earth time and if the image was taken day or night (might be useful for MAHLI night images and astronomical images). MAHLI images also will show the scale per pixel and the motor count.

The only problem I have is the pointing data. I have to study a bit because I never used the SPICE kernels for calcultations, but I hope I can achieve that.

Thanks for all the suggestions!

[charborob]

To reduce the need for server space, I was thinking that the debayering could be done on-the-fly during the downloading process, so that only the undebayered images would have to be archived.

[fredk]

It would still be nice to have at least deBayered thumbs stored on the server to ease browsing the images.

Thanks again for this, paraisosdelsistemasolar, and I'm sure you'd have a bunch of willing beta testers here if needed...

[paraisosdelsiste...]

At this point I don't have any limitations regarding file space, so debayered files won't be any problem.
If more space is needed than my host allows, I can host it by myself at home. As soon as I have a beta version I'll show you all for feedback.

Greetings!

[atomoid]

I was hoping Midnight Planets / MMB could be branched out to live into the future, so much work was perfected by Mike it would be great to continue that.
Per a recent conversation in the MER thread, he sounds too busy to continue with it, but didn't mention what he plans to do with his code base, so I was hoping for an opensource dump, but hard to say if that will happen.. In any event, however the plans manifest going forward, i'd be happy help out anyway i can.

[paraisosdelsiste...]

Sorry for the delay,

We have had some rough weeks at home, but I'm now working again on the code and I hope to have a first version in a few days (I hope so).

The code and the database will be open source as soon as I release a first version. The scraping is being done in Python, the web will be in PHP and the database will be MySQL.

[Sean]

Looking forward to this! Thanks for putting time into it 'Para-doodle'

[paraisosdelsiste...]

Hi to everybody,

Sorry again for the delay, but I'm a simple geologist and not a good programmer. I'm about to finish the robot that reads the MSL image archive. It's not only for showing the latest images, I plan, also, to be useful for searching images. That said, some of the avaiable fields will be:

- MTC, LTST and LMST
- Leds on/off
- Sun height.
- open/closed LID in MAHLI images
- Focus merge products
- Distance/resolution to object (MAHLI)

I hope to learn about spice kernels for driving/position purposes, but that will be in a later phase.

[phase4]

Hey all,

I wrote a basic Navcam viewer that reads the official json files and shows Curiosity’s panorama’s in a web browser.
It currently comes without interface and is pretty featureless in comparison to the great MidnightPlanets but it performs really well.
Check it here: https://captainvideo.nl/rob/mslview.html

To view panorama’s from a specific sol just add ?sol=2633 (or any other sol number) to the web adress.
For example: https://captainvideo.nl/rob/mslview.html?sol=2633

Hope you enjoy!
Rob