PIRL User Notes

Mars Global Surveyor

MGS Data Tools

This page is intended to be a starting point for Mars researchers that wish to utilize data from the Mars Global Surveyor. It contains links to the raw data, and also links to the various software tools that members of the community have created to analyze the data itself.

More information about the mission can be found at the MGS web page or at NASA's Mars Exploration Program web page.

Note: Due to the underwhelming response, this page never really took off and is very, very dated.

Data

Mars Global Surveyor Data Archives

Where do you get the MGS data? Get it from the Mars Global Surveyor Data Archives on the PDS Geosciences Node. Data posted on Team websites is generally intended for educational and outreach purposes. Processing information is generally not present and it is not in an archived format. If you intend to do science with the data, I suggest using the PDS data archives. Data posted at the PDS is peer-reviewed raw data, and is the official science archive. Accept no substitutes!

Tools

The data being returned by this spacecraft is phenomenal. Lots of data is good from a scientific point of view, but as more and more data comes in it becomes more and more difficult to manage and interpret. Various members of the scientific community have already written a fair amount of code to deal with this data. Those listed below are nice enough to share their work with the community.

Locating Data

It's often a daunting task just trying to find what MGS data is in the area that you are interested in. These tools may help.

U.S.G.S. Planetary GIS Web Server - PIGWAD

This is the beginning of a Global Information System for Mars. It's a great place to go to find out which MOC images or MOLA profiles are where. Once you find an image or profile that you're interested in, PIGWAD will tell you what its name is, and where to find it in the PDS archive. Even better, it's totally web-based, so there's no program to download.

AMES MOC Images

Another on-the-web resource, this web site allows you to find MOC images on a Viking map or by orbit and image number. Once you find your image, the site displays the image and displays footprint and context information.

Mars Landing Sites

This page is a resource for data in the equatorial regions on Mars, and contains information for data near proposed landing sites and 3D VRML information (see the site for details).

MOC Data analysis

For more information on the Mars Orbital Camera,
visit the Malin Space Science Systems web page.

You've found the raw images that you wanted from the PDS archive, and now you're ready to do some science.

XV plus

If you just want to take a look at the raw PDS data, I suggest using the PIRL XV Plus, which is the old XV that you know and love, modified to display all kinds of image formats, including the PDS .img format and the new compressed .imq format that the raw MOC data are in.

ISIS

ISIS is a program available for a variety of platforms, and it is the program that should be used to clean the raw images. Its useful for a variety of planetary spacecraft data, but also has specific routines written for the kinds of image noise in the MOC images.

MOLA Data analysis

For more information on the Mars Orbital Laser Altimeter,
visit the MOLA Team web page.

You've gotten the MOLA binaries that cross your region of interest, or you've found a gridded data set that suits your purposes, how do you read it?

PDS MOLA Software Archive

The MOLA team has provided a number of routines to split up the large binary files, convert the binaries to an ASCII format, and to plot the profiles. Some of the routines are in FORTRAN and others in IDL.

Geodynamics MOLA Page

The Geodynamics group at GSFC have been putting together some software in IDL to deal with the MOLA data, and more is soon to come.

The Generic Mapping Tools

This set of mapping tools can be a powerful aide in plotting MOLA data, or almost any other kind of data. These tools are written in C.

Natural neighbor interpolation of MOLA data

This page details the work of Oleg Abramov in using a natural neighbor algorithm to grid the MOLA data.

TES Data analysis

For more information on the Thermal Emission Spectrometer,
visit the TES Team web page.

TES Vanilla Software

The Vanilla software is available on every PDS TES CD, and is a command line program that reads the binary TES TSDR file format, correlates data between the various tables, and outputs the data as columns of ASCII values. Vanilla can also search the data for records that match a user specified criteria.

If you have any comments or questions, just let me know. Similarly, if you have come up with a new data tool that you think would be useful to the Mars Scientific community, please contact me, and I can add a link to it.

The University of Arizona Lunar & Planetary Lab PIRL Webmaster   07 Jun 2004