A collaborative community for planetary sciences.

Not quite sure where to start with data from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft? This article 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.

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 with so much data it can become quite difficult to manage and interpret. Various members of the 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.

JMARS

This excellent tool written in Java is a Global Information System for Mars. It currently has several data sets (MOC, MOLA, TES, THEMIS, etc.) and will no doubt be adding more as they are available.

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

This is also 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.

Mars Landing Sites

This page is a resource for data and information near proposed landing sites and 3D VRML information (see the site for details).

MOC Data analysis

For more information on the Mars Orbiter 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.

NASAVIEW

I wish I could say better things about this PDS-distributed program, but I can't. I've never been able to get it to run, and it doesn't seem terribly well supported.

XV PIRL (FTP)

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

GIMP plug-in

I've had limited success with using this PDS plug-in for the GIMP. But it can be handy.

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.

Gridview

The Geodynamics group at GSFC have been put together some software in IDL to deal with the gridded MOLA data.

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 volume, 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.

I haven't come across any data analysis software packages that manipulate the data from the Magnetometer and Electron Reflectometer (MAG/ER) or the Radio Science (RS) experiments. If you know of any, please pass them along.

If you have developed or discovered a new data tool that you think would be useful please add a comment below.