Download: Mariner Mars 1971 (MM71) Ultraviolet Spectrometer (UVS) Data in Google Earth. This is a work in progress as part of a Planetary Data Restoration Project at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and as such the data is not finalized and is subject to change.

The data comes from the Ultraviolet Spectrometer on the Mariner Mars 1971 spacecraft, and had previously been processed for the Albatross software tool back in 2002. Neither Google Earth nor its predecessor KeyHole, nor even KML, existed back in 2002, and the data needs to be accessible in a more modern and accessible visualization tool (Google Earth) in order to remain useful.

The footprints are where the instrument was looking. In each of these regions a spectral range from 2107 to 3497 Ångströms was sampled, and the spectra are visible in both the hacked multi-balloon display, and in the more detailed official Google Earth balloon visible by clicking on the footprint. Each footprint is colored, both in the map view and in the sidebar, by the response at 3049 Å, which is roughly where the ozone signal is. For more information on the data and science see the references listed at the end of this post.

Previously I implemented vertical data “curtains” in KML, useful for oceanographic transects, seismic lines, spacecraft looking down through the atmosphere in profile (as opposed to a 2D surface image), or any other vertical data. Along with vertical data (solved) and subsurface data (no known work-around), another major limitation of Google Earth is that only one description balloon is allowed to be visible at a time. However, Google Earth does support multiple placemarks (by default yellow pushpins in Google Earth, or red pins in Google Maps). The hack to get multiple balloons visible at once is to make custom icons that look like balloons and then use them in place of the default icons. If this technique is used it is advised to implement various other KML features to make the balloons only appear in certain views and therefore avoid overwhelming the viewer. I’ve used both the TimeStamp and the Level of Detail features to limit when the icons appear.

@article{barth1974atmosphere,
  title={{The atmosphere of Mars}},
  author={Barth, C.A.},
  journal={Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences},
  volume={2},
  number={1},
  pages={333--367},
  year={1974},
  publisher={Annual Reviews}
}

@article{barth1971mariner,
  title={{Mariner 6 and 7 ultraviolet spectrometer
                   experiment: Upper atmosphere data}},
  author={Barth, CA and Hord, CW and Pearce, JB and
                 Kelly, KK and Anderson, GP and Stewart, AI},
  journal={J. geophys. Res},
  volume={76},
  year={1971}
}

Mars Geology

@conference{skinner2006digital,
  title={{Digital renovation of the atlas of Mars
         1: 15,000,000-scale global geologic series maps}},
  author={Skinner Jr, JA and Hare, TM and Tanaka, KL},
  booktitle={37th Annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference},
  volume={37},
  pages={2331},
  year={2006}
}

For the Google Earth view, magnitude as been encoded as pin size and depth has been encoded as height above the Earth. A few interesting regions where the deep quakes occur, such as east of the Andes, pop out.

Earthquakes

Geo-spatial-temporal time-map of Pine Island Glacier (PIG) publications

Usage: Drag the time bars to the left or right to change the time period displayed. Navigate the map as you would any Google Map: drag to pan, zoom in (double-click, scroll mouse, or use the control on the side), or zoom out (scroll, control). Click on an item in the timeline or area in the map to get more information.

Legend: Each publication is tagged by last name of first author and publication year. Each publication is placed in the timeline at or spanning the years covered by the research or the years in which the data was collected. These dates are based on a quick skim of the articles and may have errors. Exact dates were often not given in which case rough guesses for the month range were used. Modeling studies that used future unspecified dates start at 2015 and go from there some amount into the future.

Each publication was also skimmed to see the geospatial region covered by the article, and this point, line, or area is shown on the map. Regions are rough estimates. Studies that covered the whole Antarctic continent including PIG are just given a large area around the PIG drainage basin.

Future Work

• Improve the geospatial component so that the more precise region of study is highlighted.
• Encode extra information, such as using color and/or icons to denote, for example study type (modeling, geophysical, oceanographic, etc.)
• Allow individual articles to be turned on and off. Right now so many get turned on during the 1990-2005 range that you cannot see anything in the map
• Link to PDFs for downloads
• Build an interface for anyone to submit their own articles (with time and place meta-data).

Lessons learned: Publication lists are full of typos. Even though I use software tools to manage lists of papers and citations from Google Scholar or ISI, I found dozens of typos (and different versions of names). I’m sure some remain even now that I did not find. Triple-check your bibliography.

I’m sure I’m missing some relevant articles. Please let me know of any omissions and errors.

Thanks

• BibDesk
• Timemap

I took the time this weekend to re-create a Google Earth layer showing these data. This visualization allows you to see a broad geospatial overview, and then select any particular location and see both long-term trends and even the data point for each individual month.

Download (330K)

GISTEMP.StationData

GISTEMP.StationData

One subset of the library is the KDM_KML lib for writing KML files. This code should make it fairly simple to display data sets in Google Earth from IDL.

I have currently implemented about 50% of the KML API and will get the rest implemented as time goes on. Right now layers can have overlays, points (placemarks), or linestrings (paths). Any element (that the API supports) can have a timestamp, and styles are supported too. With knowledge of the KML API you can create artistic balloons with whatever content you like that can even link to each other.

I wanted to geotag all my photos by adding the latitude and longitude to the JPEG EXIF data. I was going to code it as the algorithm is quite simple (for each image, get the creation time, find the GPS location nearest that time in the GPS list, and add the (lat,lon) coordinates to the image), but not surprisingly this problem has already been solved. Repeatedly.

Three steps are required.

1. Convert your GPS data into GPX format. If you are comfortable on the command line then use gpsbabel. If not, then go here for a web interface to gpsbabel. If you need help post in the comments. If you were on NBP09-01 a GPX file of our cruise is here.
2. Add the GPS coordinates to the image EXIF tags. There are many tools that will take a GPX or NMEA file and add latitude and longitude coordinates to your photos. I use gpicsync and photoGPSEditor looks nice too.
3. Output KML files. gpicsync does this for you, and has a list of other software that might help here. You can also upload your photos to Picasa and get a KML file that way (instructions).

The end result might look like this.

You can view all of the photos listed above in the various Antarctica photo albums, or you can view them all geospatially (KMZ) in Google Earth. The ship recorded GPS a few times a second, and I have a one-minute (temporal) resolution data file that I used to geotag the photos.

Notes: If you are viewing the photos on the website, you ought to have the Cooliris plugin installed. Load times might be a bit slow, this computer is hosted at home. If you don’t see any photos in Google Earth you’ll need to drag the time slider to the right. They’ll pop up as you pass the time they were taken.

NBP Photos Geotagged in Google Earth