For those of you who are interested in following what the Mars Rovers have been up to on any given day, you can now find out with just a click of a button.
A nearly complete set of raw images from the Spirit and Opportunity rovers are hosted at the Exploratorium web site in a subdirectory. These directories are updated daily (often hourly) with the latest imagery from the MER rovers, typically before the images get posted online at the JPL web site. The only problem is that the images are posted with mystical filenames, and it's a pain to download and organize all the images on your local hard drive (~20 GB total).
Late in the 5th inning, Michael Howard stepped up to the plate, and hit a bases loaded single on his first swing (home runs were hit by NASA/JPL/ESA earlier in the ballgame). He has written the application that all MER fans have been waiting for. It is a cross platform java application called Midnight Mars Browser that goes to the Exploratorium web site and automatically downloads some or all the imagery from the MER rovers based on dates you provide, organizes them into folders on your local drive, generates color images from frames taken with the color filters, and generates 3D anaglyphs from appropriate images. It then creates a slide show for you to browse through the images. Sweet!
This application is simply amazing!!!!
I have created a couple of possible icons for this app shown below. Nothing special, just a couple of images of mars, one with some dropshadowed text overlaid. Here are the 128x128 png files. If anyone likes them feel free to use them.
The icon files for Mac OSX are here: MMB and MMB2. Mars Image credits: NASA/Mars Global Surveyor
Enjoy this app, I certainly do!
Thanks for making it Michael. We MER fans salute you!
edit: fixed grammar, added baseball analogy and I note that OS X users will find my icon adorning the newest release of this awesome software (keep improving it Michael ;-). 2/24/05
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Midnight Mars Browser
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5 comments:
The MMB is one neat application. I love it and have been using it for a little while now. It makes keeping up with the rovers simple and fun.
Thank you!
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Hello,
I am the author of another interesting software presenting the Mars Exploration Rover Mission named VRMars-Spirit - The Red Planet Mars 3D. Now you can see the results of the MER Spirit Mission with the aid of virtual reality, which is very intuitive in my software. Please take a look at it at: www.vrmars.com
There're demos and videos there showing that astronomy software in action. I also plan to make another application on the MER Opportunity Mission.
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