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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(rover: "curiosity", sol: 869, camera: "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.

  1. Fork it ( https://github.com/chrisccerami/explore_mars/fork )
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  5. Create a new Pull Request