Albatross
Mariner Mars 1971 UVS Reflectance & TV Data Viewer
The Rhyme of the Ancient MarinerRead the IDL Documentation
[ Introduction ] [ Download ] [ Documentation ] [ Tutorial ]
[ ScreenShots ] [ ChangeLog ] [ MDC ]
Introduction
Albatross is a computer program for interactive visualization and analysis of the UltraViolet Spectrometer (UVS) and TeleVision Camera (TV) from the Mariner Mars 1971 (MM71) spacecraft.The program (written in IDL) allows the user to view any location of any size of the surface of Mars. The surface can be one of topography (MGS MOLA), visual wavelength photographic (Viking MDIM), thermal inertia (MGS TES), or geology (USGS GEO).
On top of the surface, the footprints of the UVS are displayed. Moving the mouse pointer near a footprint shows a plot of the reflectance as a function of wavelength. Optionally, the ratio of one footprint to another can be plotted.
Finally, the TV image associated with each UVS footprint can be retrieved from the Internet and displayed.
Contact Ken Mankoff (mankoff [at] lasp [dot] colorado [dot] edu) with questions, comments, and bug reports
The Mars Data Conglomerator may also be useful. It provides the same data minus the UVS footprints, and no download is required.
Installation
In order to use the Albatross software, your system must meet the following requirements:- Unix or Linux compatible system
Tested on SunOS 5.8, Darwin 6.6 (MacOS), Various Linux
May work on Windows. Untested. - v5.3 or higher of IDL
- 600MB free disk space (minimum)
- [Optional] 500MB disk space for the JPL Technical Memorandums
- [Optional] High-speed (Cable, T1, etc.) connection for TV images
- Download the software and data files: albatross.tar.gz (257MB)
- Uncompress the software with the following commands:
% gunzip albatross.tar.gz
% tar -xvf albatross.tar
NOTE: The above steps may take several minutes. - cd to the albatross directory
- Start IDL
- run ALBATROSS (see albatross.help for instrucions)
exIDL> albatross, location=[ 18, 133 ] ; Olympus Mons
Documentation
Read the Albatross tutorial (HTML)Read the IDL Documentation (ASCII text)
For information on the TV subsystem, read
JPL Technical Memorandum 33-585: Mariner Mars 1971 Television Picture Catalog
Volume I (PDF, 180MB), Volume I, Addendum I (PDF, 25MB)
Volume II (PDF, 110MB), Volume II, Addendum I (PDF, 90MB)
Go to the Mars Data Conglomerator website to view the surface of Mars with multiple datasets, and learn more about the backgrounds used in Albatross
For information on the processing done to create this dataset, and how to use the raw dataset without the Albatross software, read the README, the README.processing and the README.usage (ASCII text) files.
For locations of surface features, consult:
International Astronomical Union (HTML)
Labeled MOLA map (PDF, 515K)
Screen Shots
ChangeLog
- 2003-06-27
- Viewer: albatross.pro (v1.11). Fixed compilation error (RCS # bug).
- Web: Added ChangeLog section
- 2003-06-06
- Data: all odd orbits now included (approx. 30% larger data set). Fixed sorting bug that caused some spectra to not be included in display (they were accessible through command line interface).
- Viewer: albatross.pro (v1.10). Changed yrange calculations for RATIO MODE (asthetic). RANDOM now respects set keywords.