ExploreMars
Description
While I was attending Launch Academy, I decided to build a simple API in Rails that would allow myself, other developers, researchers, students, or anyone else to more easily access photo data from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity. The idea was that by surfacing those photos through an API, building apps that took advantage of this public resource would become easier.
Since then I decided that to make it even easier, I would build a gem that provides a few easy to use methods that access that API for you. I have also since added support for the Opportunity rover to the API and the gem.
Installation
Add this line to your application's Gemfile:
gem 'explore_mars'
And then execute:
$ bundle
Or install it yourself as:
$ gem install explore_mars
Usage
There are only a few parts to this gem so far, so it's relatively simple to use. By calling:
ExploreMars.get_by_sol(rover: <ROVER>, sol: <SOL>, camera: <CAMERA>)
For example:
ExploreMars.get_by_sol(rover: "curiosity", sol: 1000, camera: "FHAZ")
you can make a call to the API, which will return a set of Photos.
The rover parameter is name of the rover from which you'd like to
query. The rovers currently available are Curiosity and Opportunity.
The sol parameter is the Martian date of the rover's expedition
during which the photo was taken. The camera parameter is the
particular camera on the rover that the photo was taken with. The camera
argument can be entered as either a string or a symbol and is not case
sensitive. The cameras are as follows:
Curiosity's Cameras
| Abbreviation | Camera |
|---|---|
| FHAZ | Front Hazard Avoidance Camera |
| RHAZ | Rear Hazard Avoidance Camera |
| MAST | Mast Camera |
| CHEMCAM | Chemistry and Camera Complex |
| MAHLI | Mars Hand Lens Imager |
| MARDI | Mars Descent Imager |
| NAVCAM | Navigation Camera |
Opportunity's and Spirit's Cameras
| Abbreviation | Camera |
|---|---|
| FHAZ | Front Hazard Avoidance Camera |
| RHAZ | Rear Hazard Avoidance Camera |
| PANCAM | Panoramic Camera |
| NAVCAM | Navigation Camera |
| MINITES | Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES) |
You can also make the API call without providing the camera argument to receive all photos that were taken on a particular sol from all cameras:
ExploreMars.get_by_sol(rover: <ROVER>, sol: <SOL>)
If you would prefer to query by a particular Earth date instead, you can use:
ExploreMars.get_by_date(rover: <ROVER>, date: <DATE>, camera: <CAMERA>)
or
ExploreMars.get_by_date(rover: <ROVER>, date: <DATE>)
The date param should be entered as a String, formatted as "yyyy-mm-dd".
For example:
ExploreMars.get_by_date(rover: "curiosity", date: "2015-12-4")
The Photo objects that get returned have five main attributes:
rover, sol, camera, earth_date, and src.
The src attribute contains the source url of the actual image.
In order to display an image in a Rails view for example, I could use:
photos = ExploreMars.get_by_sol("curiosity", 869, "FHAZ")
photos.each do |photo|
image_tag(photo.src)
end
Contributing
If you would like to contribute to ExploreMars, feel free to create a pull request. If you'd like to contact me, you can reach me at [email protected] or on Twitter @chrisccerami.
- Fork it ( https://github.com/chrisccerami/explore_mars/fork )
- Create your feature branch (
git checkout -b my-new-feature) - Commit your changes (
git commit -am 'Add some feature') - Push to the branch (
git push origin my-new-feature) - Create a new Pull Request