Partly Cloudy Skies on Earth and Mars

Build a Prototype Server System that Gathers Satellite Data and Incorporates Daily Planetary Weather into OpenSpace

Background

Please note: It is HIGHLY recommended that you download OpenSpace, install it, and play with it prior to coming to the hackathon. OpenSpace is beta software, and it may take some time for you to get it running on your laptop. Save that time and do it before the hackathon! You can get support at the official OpenSpace Slack channel, see Resources at the bottom of this page.

No planet in the Solar System is more important than our home planet of Earth, and we've learned so much about our planet since we began our exploration of outer space. Since the launch of Sputnik over 60 years ago, there are now thousands of satellites orbiting the Earth, and they are capturing huge volumes of data every day, all day long. Viewing this data allows us to do all sorts of things ranging from visualizing the entire surface of our planet to predicting the weather. NASA and NOAA's GEOS satellites offer high cadence (rapidly updating) global images available as raw imagery. While looking at individual images is interesting, the real power of the imagery data are unlocked when viewing the imagery in sequence, projected onto the globe of the Earth that viewers are familiar with.

Like Earth, our neighbor Mars also experiences atmospheric and geological processes. We've come to understand these processes by conducting long-term observations using imaging cameras like the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) onboard of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Over the course of its operation, MARCI has taken daily, kilometer-scale maps of the Martian atmosphere with the goal of uncovering new insights about the meteorology of Mars. Specific areas of interest to scientists include Martian atmospheric dust, clouds, and polar processes. MARCI also collects images in several spectral wavelengths.

OpenSpace

Raw GEOS16 imagery ftp://ftp.nnvl.noaa.gov/GOES/ABI_TrueColor/

Raw MARCI imagery

Openspace docs on local VRT and WMS http://wiki.openspaceproject.com/components/globe-browsing/build-local-dem-patches http://wiki.openspaceproject.com/builder/wms/server-install

Martian weather

JPL HORIZONS - (NASA HORIZONS?)

• Web querying interface

Martian weather service for OpenSpace

• Brian Foo's work as a potential platform for the MWS
• climate wall description
• climate wall code
• Would we have a server set up at AMNH to server the MWS for OpenSpace
• "Star API" for the digital universe

Servers allocated at LIU and UoU, but no server at AMNH

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/martian-weather

https://www.space.com/16903-mars-atmosphere-climate-weather.html

https://www.weather.gov/fsd/mars

http://www.msss.com/msss_images/subject/weather_reports.html

http://www.msss.com/msss_images/latest_weather.html

https://pdsimage2.wr.usgs.gov/downloads/MARCI/data_B20/data_resx2/color/

This is the caption for the image linked above

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Solutions

Using OpenSpace's globebrowsing module to visualze these data sets, your challenge is to develop an interface and/or pipeline for getting this data from NASA into openspace. Currently using the GDAL library, three methods of varying complexity and usability could be implemented to importing this imagery.

Some possible solutions might be:

• A solution involving a thing. A png/jpg image on the local disk could be projected onto a globe if it is already prepared in the correct format by specifying the image file at program startup.

• Anything else you can think of! A georeferenced tiff on the local disk could be added to the globe through a VRT at startup or in real-time, using GDAL tools to prepare the raw image into a georeference tiff.

• Anything else you can think of! A WebMapService (wms) could be created to load the data in real-time on-demand over http. Using GDAL tools to prepare the raw data then convert it into a streamable format and serve the data through a WMS using Apache.

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Resources

• OpenSpace 0.13.0 beta download: The latest version of the OpenSpace software. Download it now, before the hackathon!

• OpenSpace support Slack: The official support forum for OpenSpace troubleshooting and user questions.

• OpenSpace beginning tutorials: A series of six short YouTube videos explaining how to fly, navigate, and view objects in OpenSpace with Carter Emmart, Director of Astrovisualization at the Hayden Planetarium. You should view at least the first four before the hackathon!

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Challenge owner: Micah Acinapura