Git Repository

The git repository of this project may be found at http://github.com/mpgirro/MarsRoverPictureCrawler.git

Purpose

mrpc (Mars Rover Picture Crawler) automatically downloads the pictures sent by the Mars Rovers SPIRIT and OPPORTUNITY, which where launched in 2003 by NASA and arrived at Mars in 2004. Sent for a 90 day mission, they succeeded their guaranteed lifetime for years and managed to sent enormous amounts of data, including picture material. NASA releases those pictures under a JPL Image Use Policy (a copy of the policy should have reached you among with this document. If not, you can find it here http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/imagepolicy/).

Though OPPORTUNITY remains active to this day (July 2011), SPIRIT seems to not have survived the last martian winter. On May 24, 2011, NASA announced that efforts to communicate with the unresponsive rover had ended. Therefore, last official SPIRIT picture material is from Sol 2208 (a Sol is a martian day, about 24h 37m 22.663s).

Please also note that there are not necessarily pictures of every single Sol available. So do not wonder if the crawler is broken if there are some Sols missing.

File name Code

It may seem that the file names of the pictures are selected randomly, but the 27 character file names hold a lot information about the spacecraft, camera, date, time, product information, camera filters, etc. See the 'File name code' File or http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/edr_filename_key.html for more information.

Requirements

Requires Python 2.6 or later (no Python 3 support) as well as BeautifulSoup (http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/). Make sure you have a 2.x series version installed.

Running

The python script need some command line arguments to work:

1. start_sol

   The Sol you want the crawler to start downloading from. If you do not have any pictures yet, you most likely want to start downloading at Sol 1.

2. end_sol

   The Sol you want the crawler to stop downloading afterwards. If you want to download everything released until this day, you have to look up the current Sol amount since the Mission started.

3. download_directory

   The path to the directory you want the crawler to download the pictures. This argument is optional. The default directory will be current_directory/mars_rovers/. Note that the crawler will make sub directory to sort the pictures by rover/sol/camera.

4. Run with: ./mrpc.py start_sol end_sol download_directory

   If your python binary package is located somewhere else than the path given in the script header (or if you don't have a clue what this means ;-) run the script with: python2.6 mrpc.py start_sol end_sol download_directory