MAVEN IDL Toolkit: Integrated Data Access and Visualization

Abstract:

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission has arrived at Mars and begun its investigations into the state of the upper atmosphere. Because atmospheric processes are subject to a wide variety of internal and external variables, understanding the overall forces driving the composition, structure, and dynamics requires an integrated analysis from all the available data. Eight instruments on the spacecraft are collecting in-situ and remote sensing data on the fields and particles, neutral and ionized, that make up Mars' upper atmosphere.

As the scientific questions MAVEN is designed to answer require an understanding of the data from multiple instruments, the project has designed a software toolkit to facilitate the access, analysis, and visualization of the disparate data. The toolkit provides mission scientists with easy access to the data from within the IDL environment, designed to ensure that users are always working with the most recent data available and to eliminate the usual difficulties of data from a variety of data sources and formats. The Toolkit also includes 1-, 2-, and interactive 3-D visualizations to enable the scientists to examine the inter-relations between data from all instruments, as well as from external models. The data and visualizations have been designed to be as flexible and extensible as possible, allowing the scientists to rapidly and easily examine and manipulate the data in the context of the mission and their wider research programs.