Has anyone used NASA's Planetary Data System for finding images ?

I was looking at Mars Pathfinder and ended up here: http://starbrite.jpl.nasa.gov/servlet/jpl....ts.QueryServlet

All the images are in some alien file format .IMG or .LBL so I went to the Software section and found info on a program called "NASA VIEW" went through the procedure of downloading it, (not simple lol) and finally found this message: "Windows - NASAView V2.8 - nasaview28_win.zip>
Due to unforeseen circumstances, Windows Nasaview is temporarily unavailable for download. Please check back later." ARRGHHHH, I gave up in the end.


If you've used PDS and any of the images availbale there, what do you use to view them?

Sunspot,

go to Google and lookup NASAVIEW...there are other places to download it. I'm not an imaging guru either and I find nasaview to be a little difficult to use, but it does read the imq images.

Good luck, if all else fails you, I have some of the versions saved, though not the 2.8, and if you email me at mizarkey@sbcglobal.net I'll send you the file directly.

Eric P / MizarKey

Its unfortunate that the newest version of NASAview for windows, just released a back on May 4th, is unavailable...i wonder if they are having problems specifically with the windows version. Hopefully this will get fixed soon... Unfortunetly, NASAview is one of the only tools that is built to open almost all types of PDS. The data/images within a given set of PDS files aren't of a specific format, the PDS is just a wrapper for whatever data they are providing. This means the underlying image could be JPG, or potentially, in the case of MER, ICER, or as the pathfinder files are, raw image data. That is why NASAview is so handy, it can read almost all the various formats and write GIF or JPG from it.

In terms of other tools, there was a plugin to the GIMP (confirmed to work with version 1.2, not sure if it has been updated to the newest GIMP version, 2.0). Its available at http://mars-news.de/gimp/. It is capable of reading quite a few of the varying formats, most specifically mars images luckily, including Pathfinder IMQ, MOC images, and THEMIS images. Using this, you can load the files into GIMP and save as whichever format you'd like.

Anyone know of a Photoshop plugin that can pull them in? If not, I might give GIMP a go just for batch processing once the PDS starts getting MER data in August

Doug

Thanks for your help everyone, I managed to find version 2.7 and view some of the pictures