Curiosity Image Retrieval Tools, scripts and software Options

[walfy]

Way beyond my wildest dreams. What a wonderful reference! Usually had to work my brain to guess which way I was looking. Fantastic coding wizardry! Deepest thanks.

[Poolio]

Amazing. I have often struggled to map images to terrain. With this, each location on the map has an immediate sense of place, making the stops on the journey that much more vivid and tangible. I think I have a new favorite website. Thank you for this.

[CosmicRocker]

OK, another feature update related to mapping--the image listing on http://curiositymsl.com now has a "map it" link associated with each image. ...

Joe, this is incredible and extremely useful. Thank you, thank you.

I don't want to sound like a spoiled kid asking for more after getting a nice Christmas present, but would it be possible to do the inverse, where one could click on a map position to bring up a page of images taken from that position?

[Stu]

That is fanTASTIC, thank you! Really brings Curiosity's mission to life.

[Explorer1]

That's amazing Joe, bookmarked!
Presumably the map will get extended as the rover moves beyond the borders?

[jmknapp]

I just wanted to get a better sense of the context myself, particularly a side-by-side view of map and image--that's really the sweet spot, absent a totally immersive 3-d visualization only a few years away down the road surely!

The main thing bugging me now is that for some reason I'm not getting accurate NAVCAM pointing info from the NAIF data files, don't know if it's user error or what. With a 45 degree field of view the NAVCAMs really give a good context. I keep getting that the NAVCAMs are pointed about 40 degrees down and the azimuth isn't right either. It's weird because the calculation for the MASTCAMs is very similar and they are all fixed to the mast pointing more or less in the same direction.

Knowing the CHEMCAM pointing would also be very useful as it's usually very hard to figure out what rock it's looking at. But that data comes out squirrelly too at the moment.

I can add more map tiles to expand the area covered, but as of now unless Curiosity heads deep into Yellowknife Bay to the east, I think it's due to turn around and head more or less southwest, so I think the current map will be good for months.

As for clicking on the track and getting some sort of display of images from on/near that location, I guess Mars geeks think alike, because I was thinking the same thing. There are a few edge cases to consider. Like how about if the rover moves 1cm--is that a new location? The maximum scale of the map is 0.25 meters per pixel.

One funny thing I noticed: the sequences of NAVCAM thumbnails seen occasionally are taken when the rover is moving, or at least in the middle of the traverse, Also, haven't looked at the extremely fine detail yet (maybe it isn't even totally valid for these preliminary files) but the track seems to indicate that the rover travels in a fine-scale zig-zag pattern occasionally.

[Greenish]

Joe, thanks again for your continued improvements and contributions. It's a great tool and really helps makes the place come alive. For the true amateurs like me it really helps interpretation too since I spend less time wondering which way is up.

Regarding the suggestion to expand the map, I think having even a lower-res larger area map behind the current one would be useful for identifying far-off features in horizon images. But since you've provided pointing and location data that's no longer needed to triangulate position.... and most of the time is spent looking down at the local area anyway.

What I'd find somewhat useful, and perhaps simpler to implement than reverse-map-lookup is a graphical interpretation of the field-of-view - i.e. a wedge around the arrow that's 5.1 deg wide for MR, 16.8 wide for ML etc. I know that depends on camera pitch, whether the whole image width is used, etc. But really it's all icing on the cake at this point.

[fredk]

Let me add to the chorus - this is insanely cool.

About clicking on the map to get a list of images taken near there, that strikes me as not extremely useful, since we can simply read the corresponding sol(s) from a route map and view images from that sol(s). Maybe the idea is that this would automatically select the sol range if it's more than one sol? Also, as you point out, (as with MER) there are mid-drive navcam images that could be found this way.

But here's what would strike me as really useful: Click on two points on the map. The first one selects the rover position, and the second defines an azimuth. (So the 2nd defines only a unit vector, not a distance.) Then you could return a list of images from that rover location, looking (within some preset +/- azimuth range) towards the selected azimuth.

In principle this could be extended to image elevation as well, ie you could somehow specify an elevation and then the returned images point near that elevation (and previously specified azimuth). Though it's not clear how you'd specify that...

[mhoward]

Joe: Just to make sure you're aware, in the engineering rawids characters 19-21 is the site counter and 22-25 is the drive counter. It works similar to MER; you've probably seen the relevant papers. You can determine which locations are significant by counting the number of images in whatever way you like. Occasionally you'll have non-driving locations that are close enough together you might want to combine them, but not often.

[jmknapp]

Thanks for the tips and suggestions. No, I wasn't aware of the siteid/driveid thing.

Greenish's suggestions are good and have the virtue of being pretty simple to implement. The map now ahows an FOV wedge when the pointing info is available. The wedge extends out far irrespective of the elevation, so the actual range of an image needs to be taken into consideration/guesstimated based on the given elevation and terrain.

Also, I added a layer with a mosaic of the NW quadrant of Gale Crater from the MRO CTX camera. Note that it doesn't appear until you zoom out pretty far. It's slightly misregistered--I'll tweak that eventually.

[atomoid]

That's absolutely amazing! i hope they pay you enough!
a glutton might whine for even more tasty morsels, so ill try:
filter by: bearing, elevation, SOL range,

regarding the "clicking on the map to get a list of images taken near there", id see the usefulness of clicking on the map itself rather to find images that have that point in their view, and filter as desired to reduce the hit list, especially if an elevation map could be used in the plot to eliminate images where the point is out of view behind a rise. would be nice to have an easy way to find images of various features from various angles, near or far.

[stewjack]

This new fangled concept of being confident of the direction that you are looking out from the mast towards -
is going to take some getting used to! At least as long as there is no pointing information associated with the
Navcams I can claim that it was because I was looking at the Navcams, that I became disoriented. Otherwise -
I wouldn't have ANY excuse!

[jmknapp]

At least as long as there is no pointing information associated with the Navcams...

Figured out the problem with the NAVCAM pointing--fixed:

http://curiositymsl.com/imgpoint.php?name=...1576NCAM00535M_

No excuses...

[stewjack]

No excuses...

Oh My!

[maschnitz]

Oh, Joe, doing your own site, for free - no apologies or excuses needed. Stuff happens. We're lucky to have your work.

And, great work lately. Keep it up!