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https://github.com/mpgirro/marsroverpicturecrawler

A download bot for OPPORTUNITY and SPIRIT Mars Rover Pictures
https://github.com/mpgirro/marsroverpicturecrawler

Last synced: 12 days ago
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A download bot for OPPORTUNITY and SPIRIT Mars Rover Pictures

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README 

        
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