Today is one day before my one-year anniversary at the Mars Space Flight Facility, and also one day after I finally got something else launched that the public might have a remote interest in.

Yesterday we sent out the official press release about our Suggest an Image project.

In a nutshell, for now you can go to the site and download a KML file to load into Google Earth 5. This file shows you where the Mars Odyssey spacecraft is going to be orbiting over the next week, and lets you suggest areas on the planet for the mission planners at my office to image with the THEMIS camera. If you've got the Google Earth browser plugin installed, you can also try this out without ever leaving your browser.

If/when the spacecraft takes the picture, we email it to you, and it looks something like this.

Eventually (i.e. when the Google guys get around to it) this will be a feature in the Mars Gallery in Google Earth itself.

For those of you interested in how this is done with Drupal, I did a writeup here.

Demonstrating the application at JPL's Open House earlier this month:

Came in this morning, and the entire central part of our building ... reeks of cat piss. Apparently this happens whenever it rains with any vigor, due to the crazies that are raising colonies of feral cats under our building.

I watch them feed the little buggers outside my window every day. I'm tempted to "accidentally" dump water on them one of these days.

Thankfully, my office is not in an area affected by the stench. Yet.

Yarns have already been spun by MSFF old-timers about the unholy aroma that permeates the building when one of the many cats actually dies in the crawlspaces. I cannot wait to experience that myself.

It's becoming clear to me that many (perhaps not all) NASA web sites and web services are set up in such a way that it's damn near impossible to get the information you need out of them without chanting the correct incantation and sacrificing a chicken. It's a bit frustrating, and a bit like the web c. 1999.

Case in point: I need to retrieve data from a JPL data service and a Goddard application to feed data into a little widget I'm working on for the Explore Mars site (old site still up).

In an ideal world, I'd query those services and they'd return something in spiffy XML or JSON format, which I could parse with a script or Flex, and I'd be done.

In a less ideal world, the web pages would be formatted in such a way that I could pull the data I was looking for out of the HTML source code using some clear delimiters.

Unfortunately, the reality is somewhat less convenient:

The JPL Horizons service has three ways to access data -

1. A web service that returns data in a big <PRE> tag box, which for you non-geeks is basically a big wad of text. Computers don't like to find bits within big wads of text, at least not without substantial extra effort. Plus, the input parameters to the script that generates the results is entirely obfuscated.
2. An interactive Telnet service that doesn't seem to have a way to pass all the parameters for the data you're seeking at once, and STILL returns a big wad of text at the end.
3. A batch email service that does return some of the data we're looking for, but again, wrapped in a crapload of extra text.

The Goddard page is just as inconvenient - no friendly text tools there at all, just a goofy Java applet. Sigh. Guess I can run all the equations to calculate the data myself.

My hope is that I can make my own little corner of the NASA web-o-sphere somewhat more friendly to those that wish to get at the data without spending their days figuring out ways to scrape screens and parsing emails.

Disclaimer: I understand why some of these tools may have been built this way, but c'mon, I know it really is rocket science, but is it that hard to push this data out into an XML file, or at least CSV, if you've gone through all the trouble of making the calculations already? Or, just format your web pages so that the data is wrapped in a reasonably parseable tag structure?

Ground control to Major Pork

That's right. The two whitest people on the planet are moving to one of the hottest, sunniest regions of the country. What could possibly go wrong? I've got my SPF-80 ready, along with my UV protection suit.

After my nine year stint with McClatchy, I'm moving from the newspaper industry to work for NASA's Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State in Tempe. I'll be their web geek.

While I'll miss coworkers, I'm looking forward to the new challenge and a change of scenery. Oh yeah, and I get to work with data beamed from spacecraft orbiting and crawling across another planet. How cool is that? Makes Lowcountry Star seem kinda lame.