introduction to the marslab ecosystem

marslab is an ecosystem of analysis software for remote sensing data, with a special emphasis on multispectral observations of Mars. It includes both "applications" (discrete user-facing programs designed to support specific workflows) and "infrastructure" (support code ranging from language frameworks to format definitions to reference implementations of spectral parameter calculations). The applications are designed to be focused: each one has a specific purpose, attempts to accomplish that purpose well, and eschews feature creep. They are also designed to be interoperable: by using common exchange formats, they can collectively support an extremely wide variety of data processing, exploration, analysis, and presentation tasks.

purpose of this repository

This marslab-reference repository is intended to provide a central reference and "landing page" for all marslab libraries. It may also eventually contain documentation and supplementary materials.

member libraries

• marslab: as the name suggests, marslab is the ecosystem's core support library. It defines common formats, shared references, and support objects, many of which are also useful on their own. Highlights include Look, a lightweight construction kit for multispectral visualizations; and BandSet, an object that streamlines operations on multispectral observations, treating entire clusters of related images as coherent wholes.
• VISOR: the Visual-Infrared Spectral brOwseR is a search and visualization engine for reflectance spectra, especially intended to help researchers find laboratory spectra that correspond to remote sensing observations. A live instance of VISOR is available for public access at https://www.westernreflectancelab.com/visor/.
• MultiDEx: the Multispectral Data Explorer is a spectral data exploration and plotting tool. It allows users to rapidly visualize arbitrary parameters of arbitrary subsets of large multispectral data sets. It is relatively dataset / instrument-agnostic, leveraging tools from marslab to permit quick application to new bodies of data. It is in active tactical use on Mars 2020 Mastcam-Z and Mars Science Laboratory Mastcam, and has beta support for MSL ChemCam.
• asdf: this application provides archive spectral data functions that allow users to archive spectral data files by keysmashing a-s-d-f. It streamlines last-mile processing for observational data by converting them into common interchange formats, concatenating them with metadata from many sources, calculating derived parameters, rendering a host of visualizations, and sending all of these products to shared data repositories. It is in tactical use on Mars 2020 Mastcam-Z and also used for analysis on MSL Mastcam. We are unfortunately unable to make an implementation of asdf publicly available at this time. Both existing implementations of asdf contain many dataset-, instrument-, and environment-specific components, and, as such, are covered by mission nondisclosure rules.
• dustgoggles: low-level tools and light frameworks for the ecosystem as a whole. dustgoggles consists of abstract utilities that solve engineering problems in other marslab libraries but are not closely coupled to science domain logic. As such, some of its components are also suitable for supporting thematically unrelated libraries outside the ecosystem.

licensing and availability

The software components of most marslab libraries are licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License; most are publicly available on GitHub. Some of them (along with their supporting data and metadata files) are additionally subject to mission-level confidentiality restrictions on distribution (distinct from copyright).

The non-code components of the marslab-reference repository are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Please contact chase@millionconcepts.com with questions on licensing and data availability.