[X] My Assistant

[DEChengst]

I wrote a shell script that allows you to download all images from a given sol.:

http://paranoid.dechengst.nl/files/MSLget.sh

There are two rm commands in the script to clean up the tempdir. If you're afraid my script screws up your system replace them with rm -i commands. If you want any features added please let me know and I'll see what I can do.

EDIT1:

Added leading zeros in the directory names for easy sorting after a request for it on IRC.

EDIT2:

I see a lot of people downloading the script. To be clear: This is a script for *NIX systems and won't run on a standard Windows box. To get it running under Windows you need to install a *NIX environment like Cygwin. Your other option would be to install something like Ubuntu in VirtualBox.

EDIT3:

As RoverDriver pointed out you need to have wget on your system to use this script. The script now handles this gracefully.

[elakdawalla]

First: AWESOME!

It would be great to filter by camera.

I think image dimensions would be more useful than file size.

I'm amused by the "lag" column, though it's not exactly fair, since it folds in both transmission lag (when did it arrive on Earth?) and raw posting lag.

I'd prefer smaller thumbnails and more images per page, but don't know if that opinion is shared.

This takes more logic, but: it would be great if it did not show *both* thumbnails *and* fulls of the same image. It would be lovely if it could just show the highest-resolution one returned to Earth so far.

[jmknapp]

I think image dimensions would be more useful than file size.

True, that was just a matter of expediency. I can find out the size of the files remotely with a "curl -sI <url>" command, but to get the image dimensions I would need to download all the files as they come in. That could be done.

I'm amused by the "lag" column, though it's not exactly fair, since it folds in both transmission lag (when did it arrive on Earth?) and raw posting lag.

Haha, I thought that was potentially snarky too, but still, it's of interest to know how "live" the images are. There was a press conference last week where a guy from "Nasa Watch" was insinuating that if they happened to find a picture of stromatolites they would withhold it (which Dr. Grotzinger of course denied). Anyway, looking at earth-shattering photos like NRA_397586934EDR_F0010008AUT_04096M_ which was "withheld" for almost a week, it would seem that real life is less intriguing.

Thanks for the other good suggestions.

[mcaplinger]

...earth-shattering photos... which was "withheld" for almost a week...

In some cases the image is only partially received on the ground the first time around and retransmissions have to be commanded. That can slow things up, sometimes considerably. Also, images can be prioritized low and get stuck behind higher-priority data. I seem to recall images showing up weeks or even months after acquisition on MER. So the lag is pretty meaningless.