MarsPhotos
A Ruby wrapper for NASAs Mars Rover Photos API.
Installation
Add this line to your application's Gemfile:
gem 'mars_photos'
And then execute:
$ bundle
Or install it yourself as:
$ gem install mars_photos
Usage
For basic usage, instantiate an API object either with or without an API key (if you don't provide one it will be set to the demo key, which allows for 30 requests per IP address per hour, and a maximum of 50 requests per day). Get an API key from NASA here.
@api = MarsPhotos::API.new # Sets API key to 'DEMO_KEY'
@api = MarsPhotos::API.new('YOUR_KEY_HERE')
Retrieve photos by rover and sol like this:
@api.get(rover: 'curiosity', sol: 1000)
This returns an array of the photos, each with an img_src
attribute.
You can provide an earth date in the format YYYY-MM-DD instead of a sol:
@api.get(rover: 'curiosity', earth_date: '2015-6-3')
For photos from a specific camera, just specify a cam
in the method's parameters:
@api.get(rover: 'curiosity', sol: 1000, cam: 'fhaz')
You can call this method with a block:
@api.get(rover: 'curiosity', sol: 1000) do |photo|
puts photo['img_src']
end
You can also instantiate the Rover class:
@curiosity = MarsPhotos::Rover.new(name: 'curiosity') # uses demo key
@curiosity = MarsPhotos::Rover.new(name: 'curiosity', key: 'YOUR_KEY_HERE')
@curiosity.get(sol: 1000)
@curiosity.get(earth_date: '2015-6-3')
@curiosity.get_by_sol(1000)
@curiosity.get_by_earth_date('2015-6-3')
Rovers
Images are available from three rovers:
Rover | Landing Date |
---|---|
Spirit | January 4, 2004 |
Opportunity | January 25, 2004 |
Curiosity | August 6, 2012 |
Sols
Sol is a time measurement representing the number of Martian solar days since the rover landed. It starts from 0.
Cameras
Abbreviation | Camera | Curiosity | Spirit | Opportunity |
---|---|---|---|---|
FHAZ | Front Hazard Avoidance Camera | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
RHAZ | Rear Hazard Avoidance Camera | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
MAST | Mast Camera | ✓ | ||
CHEMCAM | Chemistry and Camera Complex | ✓ | ||
MAHLI | Mars Hand Lens Imager | ✓ | ||
MARDI | Mars Descent Imager | ✓ | ||
NAVCAM | Navigation Camera | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
PANCAM | Panoramic Camera | ✓ | ✓ | |
MINITES | Mini Thermal Emission Spectrometer | ✓ | ✓ |
Development
After checking out the repo, run bin/setup
to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec
to run the tests. You can also run bin/console
for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.
To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install
. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb
, and then run bundle exec rake release
, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem
file to rubygems.org.
Contributing
Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/cltweedie/mars_photos.
License
The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.