Off-Nominal - 54 - A Really Long Dog on Mars

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

Matt Brealey joins Jake and Anthony to talk about martian terrain data and imagery, and to go behind the scenes on his incredible creation, AreoBrowser.DrinksHovered Ridge - Ten Bends Beer - UntappdMilk Shake - Wiper And True - UntappdTopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 54 - A Really Long Dog on Mars (with Matt Brealey) - YouTubeJuno•ObserverAreoBrowserSvelte • Cybernetically enhanced web appsReact – A JavaScript library for building user interfacesFuck Everything, We're Doing Five BladesFollow MattMatt BrealeyMatt Brealey (@badgrenola) / TwitterFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

DLS and go for main engine, start. Hello, friends. Welcome to off nominal 54. I don't know why we do the numbers now. I do the numbers as part of the intro now. Just to, I don't know, maybe they're getting cool after 50. Like, what's my, why I know it? Once you get past a certain point, you're allowed to brag about it.

Is that what it is? That we've done effectively an entire year of weekly shows, only two months into our weekly experiment. Yeah. That's one way to look at it. Jake, we've got a, if you drew the Venn diagram of this podcast, of space nerds, developers, people that like beer. And drinking. Yeah, we've got one, we've got a friend that sits right at the crossover of all of them.

Matt, how is it going? I love Venn diagrams as well, so it's perfect. It's a quad, an extra Venn diagram. Yeah, absolutely. Totally, yeah, it's awesome. Thank you so much for inviting me on. It's a huge pleasure to chat to you guys. man now I'm thinking about a bend diagram when one of the circles says

bend diagram and it's like the funniest yeah yeah I can't quite pause that do you have to add that to your uh the star liner star lab starship star yeah yeah the star vent diagram yeah you gotta break that one back out oh man okay all right we're off to a good start here oh yeah well where do we start this show I think you should we do drinks right yes we were just joking before that At some point along this train, we're going to figure out how to start a show. But I think it's drink. So, well, Matt, why don't you start?

You're the guest. I can do. So obviously, I know you like a nice fancy drink, obviously space-themed, if you can. So a couple of years ago, I got really into stouts, like really dark beer. Just for some reason, it's always cold and winter here. You know, that's just what you do. And I'm lucky in Bristol, there's a whole bunch of, like, amazing breweries just, like, around the corner from us. So I picked this one, which is a milk.

Shake, get in the frame. I'll hop you out. Other direction. Work it. There it is. Look at that. Wiper and true milkshake, which is like drinking chocolate milk, basically, but it has a space shuttle on it as well, which is just seems perfect.

Can you explain what the name of that beer means to an American? Uh, milk shape or wiper and true? Wiper and True. I feel like that's a, is it just two cool words? I think it's just a, yeah, two cool words put together. I don't know. I don't know if I ended up in your neighborhood and asked to went in somewhere and asked for a wiper and true and they'd be like, ugh.

different part of town, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Somewhere else. Yeah, it's a delightful, dark-licking, like, proper wintery drink. Even though spring's grunt in today, but like dark drinks are good.

He's got the whole thing going. Excellent. Yeah. Anthony, what do you have to? I broke out the beer today. I've got this one from 10 bends in Vermont, and it's called Hubbard Ridge. And it just kind of looks like cool Martian photos, like of the mountains

into the distance. I just just digging the terrain vibe given our topic today. I'm kind of getting like a Titan vibe from that, not a Mars vibe. I know, but I just meant more like it's a terrain vibe generally. I'm trying to make it tropical. Try to do like a show call back there.

I know. The colors are backwards. It's a red sky and blue ground instead of the other way around, but you know. Very nice. I'm not in the space beer haven that Vancouver was, so my camera is freaking. There it is. Oh, there you go. You're back.

You're back. Yeah, so I totally forgot about setting anything up today. And then I, so I had to go and work with what I had. But thankfully, I had a lot of stuff. So I'm just doing a traditional margarita today. Oh, look at you. Nothing too crazy. Just some good Mexican tequila and lime juice and orange liqueur.

Straightforward. So the investment in your liquor setup has paid off now in that you've scrambled to pull one together for the show. Yeah, past me finally did future me a favor for one single. A well-stocked section of your house. I might have gone a little heavy on the tequila on this, though, so we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. Cool. Yeah, so maybe Matt, why don't you just start with a, how do you, I'm always interested when two people are, you know,

come up with like multiple interests that all align. And so, like, you're in this web development space and you're also in each loving Mars images space. and I don't need a ton of people like that. And so how do you find both those paths? Like, tell us a little bit about yourself. It's a big straggly route, to be honest, which has always surprised me every step along the way. So the really short version of the story is,

so my background's, it's not in academia or Mars or anything like that. It's in visual effects. So I worked in the visual effects industry for about six years, full time, and then left about four years ago now, I think. Time has ceased to have any meaning. I think it was about four years ago. And the kind of thing with being in visual effects and being on the software side of things,

so I was like making kind of tools for artists to kind of facilitate their work being as kind of quick and pain free as possible. I have no artistic talent whatsoever, so software suited me like really well. And it started like making apps and things. And the interesting thing with visual effects is that a lot of the problems solved in visual effects

are also kind of very relevant to planetary science data. So in VFX you're dealing a lot with image processing. And you're talking about specifically around faking moon landings, things like that. This is all how it was done. Like, you know, it's just, we went to the set, actually, it was a minute. But yeah, so like, you know, you're dealing with images that are crazy high resolution and the color has to be spot on because someone will notice if it isn't. And you're talking about like 3D models, which can be incredibly tiny or just like gigantic

and like span entire cities and stuff. And so the idea of kind of creating a, manipulating and working with images in a useful way or kind of 3D data in a useful way is something that has been faced in VFX for like decades now and so when I left I was kind of interested to try and put those approaches towards some kind of planetary data kind of thing obviously always love space I have beer with space shuttles on it And so you know there's as I'm sure we'll get into a huge data set and a huge data source kind of to pull from when doing kind of Dev tests and random kind of prototypy projects with space data. So it's a perfect kind of subject to start playing with. And it's just constantly rewarding as well, which is great. Yeah. Okay. And so like what you just like always been, you said always

been in love with space, but like is there any story behind that or just kid kid who had a model space shuttle when he's growing up? It's exactly the second thing. Yeah. It's just always been there in the back of my brain. Yeah. And so it's it's lovely to be able to kind of, I don't know, feel closer to it, I suppose. Obviously not part of anything. a pleasure or anything like that, just being out to play around with it and kind of, you know, show people, hopefully, a little bit more stuff and a bit more context is kind of awesome. What made you leave visual effects? Just not taking it anymore? Okay.

No, I'm kind of doing it freelance a little bit. Like half of my work is kind of visual effectsy stuff still. It's kind of like lots of like Python stuff and things like that. And then I kind of do a bunch of like iOSy stuff and web stuff and other things as well. kind of yeah just just get to work with some interesting people doing interesting things and then trying to put kind of those skills in kind of the space kind of mindset and trying to come up with things that could be cool is yeah a nice way to spend kind of the free time yeah that's really cool I am I was thinking about these data the other day because there's like uh should we show

like should we show the thing man think maybe we should show yeah well see I was while you were talking I'm sitting over here playing with Juno Observer. This is the other one too, because this one is sweet. And maybe before we go full Mars, we can talk about this, because Juno is an interesting mission from an imagery perspective in that, like, they threw a camera on, and then they're like, everything else beyond this inclusion of the camera is up to y'all. Like, as y'all asks for it, here's the image data, go crazy.

So what is this thing that you built? Because it is pretty rad to look at imagery this way. I feel like it contextualizes it totally differently. Thank you man. I appreciate that. Yeah, this is something that I started kind of after area browse after the first version of it because yeah, just trying to play around with a different data set basically. And obviously I think, you know, this was a couple of years ago now, like you said, everyone was kind of being just thrown this data and kind of asked to figure it out. And there was a time where there were probably like, I don't know, a handful like

eight, ten people all trying to figure it out and kind of swap information and like have like little email threads and things at the same time trying to figure out how to get this stuff to sit correctly and align correctly on the globe. And so I kind of love 3D stuff. I've always loved 3D stuff. I find it really useful way to visualize things. So I thought it would be kind of cool if you can just display like an entire pair of Joe's worth of data in 3D, kind of on your mobile if you want to use it,

and kind of hopefully see all of the storms and stuff in those images kind of pinpoint right on top of each other so you can kind of get a bit of a time lapse in a few places. and then that blue line you can see going around it is obviously the path that Juno is taking and every dot on that blue line is kind of exactly where it was when it took that image. Yeah. I find the mix of like showing the swath of imagery on Jupiter and how big it is just a couple of steps out from the closest approach and then how tiny it gets when you get really close to the planet. It contextualizes how gigantic Jupiter is because it's like, okay, it's a giant planet. like, you know, how big could a planet be?

You know, it's a planet. And then you see the difference in image swath from like here to here. It's like, boink. Now it's a tiny part of Jupiter that you're covering with this image. Yeah. It's an amazing day I'm going to write with. I mean, it's, you know, I find Jupiter incredibly fascinating and terrifying and all kinds of like emotional kind of things to look at.

And so like working with it was great. I mean, I think there is a certain level of artistry with working with the Jupiter data as well. So, I mean, one of the reasons that I didn't or haven't prioritized it as recently is that actually putting the data together in a kind of technical way and getting a perfect image out is not necessarily what I'm the most interested in. I got kind of close. This is what I was going to ask about because I thought I've heard that the Juno raw data is like really not user friendly. It's like a whole ball of the channels are split up and it's like it's like this whole big mess of just bits and you've got to actually do the work yourself turned into it like a JPEG, you know? Yeah, it's amazing. It's basically this long strip of, yeah, just like segments of images put together. And you have to kind of split that up into separate kind of parts of the image and separate them a little bit and then put them back together into a frame and then combine that frame in multiple ways to get kind of color and stuff.

And it's, yeah, it's kind of an ordeal putting that together. I spent a long time like rendering a lot of information to try and get those images as good as they are. and, you know, they're fine. They're totally fine. But, like, now a lot of people are doing it way better with, like, consistency that I just strove for this entire time and never hit. So kind of, like, the idea of putting it together and merging it all together is kind of passed me by a little bit.

But, yeah, it was really good to see it, like you say, in 3D, gave a bit of context to the size of those storms and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know I've heard some interviews with, like, you know, like Kevin Gill has a really great pipeline for Juno images and just the work that he, that he's, put into taking that stream and actually producing something with it is like it's like a full-time hobby for him basically is like processing juno data so yeah i mean his his images though it's like i mean there's a reason that his images kind of you know get shared everywhere him and like sean durand all those

kind of people like you know they're amazing and they are just like as perfect as you would ever hope to get an image like that so it's um yeah it's it's phenomenal yeah it's a cool community too because there's like some people that are doing kind of like low level stuff and then others are building on So like there's all this like ecosystem of people processing it and moving it around. So it's kind of fascinating. Yeah, I mean, it's the same with the Mars stuff a lot in the sense of there are huge communities that build up around it. And in terms of, you know, the term citizen science, I'm not a big fan of that term,

but the idea of people who are just not directly associated with missions or employed by space agencies doing stuff, members of the public, doing cool stuff. With this data is such a awesome way to get more final images or more. kind of interesting things in front of the general public, right? So it's, yeah, those little communities that build up are just super inspiring and fun to be in. I'm realizing as we talk about this that the fendigram of the best friendship that we're watching witness the birth of here between Jake and Matt is like we're just adding on more vend diagrams with context being another gigantic vend diagram that Jake cannot get enough context in his life.

And I feel like all of your projects, we'll talk about Aero Browser now, is all like adding context to imagery in ways that you have not experienced before. So we're going to draw this out at the end of the day. It's going to be like a six or seven circle. So this is, you got to do the elevator pitch because there's so much that I'm looking at here that I don't even know where to start explaining what you actually built.

And we should mention again, ario browser.com. It's like Oreo with an A at the front browser.com. Yeah. So I kicked myself. with that name, but we'll get to know it's great. It targets who you need it to target, but I just want to explain it for people that are like, what is area? Thank you very much.

So, yeah, I mean, to be honest, the elevator pitch for this has become a little bit unwieldy recently as it's kind of grown and changed. And like when I did this new version with this new smash page, I had to try and come up with kind of three bits of text essentially that describe it. So there's one at the very top, there's one in the kind of rover features section, and there's one in the like in the terrain section as well. So the one in the top, which I'll just read straight from it, is easily explore all of the latest Martian terrain data and rover imagery right in your browser on desktop and mobile. Is like the most succinct I've managed to get that.

Broadly speaking, it's basically a way of, like it says, browsing data from a whole bunch of missions. And it started off just being high-rise data, just being terrain data. but since that point, more kind of mission imagery got in. So HRC data came in as well on the terrain sides. USGS published imagery came in on the terrain side as well. And then I did a release about a year ago, I think, where I put in kind of the paths of curiosity and perseverance on certain DTMs. If they overlap, you can now see those, which is great.

And obviously, with that, you can tell what soul you're on, and that's fantastic. And if you click a part of the path in there, essentially you can then jump to the raw images site for that soul, which is, again, bringing a bit of context to where things were at certain points. But obviously, going to an external site to pull in that information is not necessarily the most useful way to do it.

So I kind of thought, well, I want to bring all the stuff together. I want people to be able to see what the rover saw at this point and not just image data, but other data as well. So the first thing I need to be able to do is read in this image data. And so about, probably about 10 months ago, realistically, I started, although it is, you know, as we get to as well, part time and stuff like that. So it's not necessarily industrious constantly.

But about eight months ago, I started putting in kind of support for curiosity and perseverance and ingenuity data with the key thing being trying to make it as easy to browse as possible. I mean, a browser up to that point always worked on mobile and was, I was really proud of that. And I really wanted to kind of accessibility means a lot of things. It doesn't just mean having access to the data. It means, you know, I can use it with just keyboard shortcuts and things like that and trying to present it to people in ways that are just easy to grasp and easy to see and easy to understand. And so I tried to do that.

And the way I came up with was essentially grouping the many, many, many thousands, hundreds of thousands of images together in what is at this point semi-logical ways. So, for instance, what you're looking out on screen at the moment with the ingenuity data, like the things that come from, the images that come from ingenuity that could be presented in a sequence are, for the most part, hopefully, presented in a sequence. Same with other missions. If there's stereo imagery, it's hopefully presented in a kind of stereo viewer. So you can see the left eye, the right eye, maybe an anaglyph view. Maybe you can toggle between them, this kind of thing as well. So it's just trying to increase that kind of, I don't know, the ease of viewing essentially for people who aren't maybe familiar with the data, certainly not part of the mission,

and just kind of, you know, hopefully give them something awesome to play with as well. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's like a really, really useful goal nowadays because, like, like so when when NASA started like really streaming like you say like opportunity rover data you know it's like okay you can go to this website and there's some images that come down and it's like pretty straightforward like you could consume that much data and it wasn't a big deal so if you were like into it you can go every week and see what came down and look at you know 30 pictures and you'd be done right but so it's funny because you know I was at LPSC a couple weeks ago with all the planetary scientists and I was talking to these mass chem Z folks who have you know this beautiful new camera on Perseverance. And I told them, I'm like, you're making it really hard to keep up with this because I go to the, I go to the Perseverance page and it's just page after page after page of mosaics every day. Like I just like I can't really can't look at all these photos.

There are too many of them. And so it's making it hard for me to like, I used to like, you know, try and look at all the image to figure out what's going on with the rover. And now I can't even like really process it all with. So having something like this is like really beneficial because you do group that stuff. And I can go, okay, there's one picture. even though it's multiple data, right? Right, right. I think that's the thing.

It's the problem on every mission that's going to happen from here on in, right? It's because everything is creating so much data. And it's obviously phenomenal, and we should stress that it's ridiculously, amazingly fantastic that we have access to any of this stuff. The fact that we can see it and get to it on my mobile phone anyway

is brilliant. And that obviously takes a lot of people making the right decisions and kind of fighting for that. But kind of finding your way through it is going to start taking a little bit of a different approach, like a different kind of language almost of how we can kind of consume this stuff, I think. Because like you say, you know, I'm downloading in the background of the moment,

I'm downloading some Cassini images, like at the labels for them because I kind of did a test of doing like Cassini browser or something like that. But it's like 400,000 images. And it's like, okay, how do I even begin knowing to kind of, I was like showing my, I went home for the weekend. I was showing my nan. She's like really interested in space stuff as well. And I was like, I'll show us some cool Cassini stuff. And I had no idea where to start because it doesn't I was just like, I don't, like, this is all gray and weird and I don't understand it. So, like, yeah, finding the right kind of points, like jumping off points for people and giving them, like, a nice place to start with the stuff and, like, you know, filters and things like that is obviously a good way forwards. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What you were saying about, like, the increase of data from more advanced images, I feel like on the front page here you've got the amount of images that you have from each spacecraft. and it's like, you know, a couple hundred thousand from Spirit Opportunity and almost a million from curiosity and perseverance is already at 106,000. So like the the exponential curve of how much imagery is coming off these things. Like, you know, there's going to quickly be as many images from the helicopter as there was from Spirit. Like that's not too, you know, it's not going to trail that much if it keeps going well. Yeah.

That's 100,000 images a year. So. Yeah. That's crazy, right? from each rover. Like, oh, man, it's, it's nuts. And Cassini, you're saying 400,000 over, what was it? How many years was it? 12, 13? Forget how old? Yeah, I think so. Right. Yeah, it was a lot. 13 or 14, yeah. So even, and that was just like one generation back. So, yeah, you know, your work, what we're really laying into you here is how much harder your work's

going to get. It's funny, though, to hear, to hear you talk about this in the same way that I hear commercial satellite imagery companies talking about this stuff that, like, yeah, it's great. we have all this data from all these planet dovesats, but how do we make sense of it? Do humans go through everything? They're having the same issues at like an industrial scale that you are from the NASA science scale, which is admittedly huge,

but there's a handful of Mars missions. You're able to build a thing that contains all the Mars missions. There are hundreds of doves in orbit right now, and planets trying to do all this at a ridiculous scale. They're getting probably, I don't even know how often a dove's taking an image, but this is something we should ask, Tanya, I guess. how many images they're getting. But it's got to be unbelievable.

I mean, there's some extraordinary percentage of planet imagery that will never be looked at by a human. Like, it's like 98, 99% will never ever be looked at by a human being. Like it's kind of a silly thing. Yeah, completely. I mean, what do you throw away? What do you back up? Like, how do you do backups of, you know,

umpteen terabytes of data on a regular basis? That seems insane, right? You wait for Matt to go download them all. You've now completed the 321 strategy of Cassini imagery Well, we've got one in Colorado and there's one in Bristol now Yeah, I'm trying to make myself vital as quickly as possible basically So like it's the key How do I elbow my way into the space industry

Be the backup for every planetary mission Yeah, just like I've got to like stack You can't see it, but just off screen is like stacks of hard drives And things like that We joke, but like things have been saved that way Right, there was like Apollo like video and photos that were lost and somebody's like, oh no, I got one of those.

And we're like, why do you have one? It's like, it doesn't matter, I have one. It doesn't matter. Don't ask a lot of questions. I'm giving it back to you. I know this is legally yours, but it was mine for the last 40 years. I have a question about like the,

we can get really geeky about Dati here, but like when you think about the metadata that comes with some of these. So compare, well, okay, so I want to ask this in two ways. We'll start with the age one. So look at the older generation of Rover Spirit and Opportunity versus newer, curiosity, and then even more perseverance.

Is it easier to work with the newer data? Are they being better with like, you know, a metadata that comes with that picture, pointing information, I don't know, time of day, all that kind of stuff? Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, I'm glad you asked that, because like I've been trying to,

I've wrote a, little blog recently kind of talking about that, like a really tiny one. So I first read one over it in ages, so it's like tiny. But it was basically talking about that and like how the amount of metadata we get with perseverance is, and the consistency of the metadata we get with perseverance and ingenuity is, you know, a level above what we got with curiosity. And the fact that, you know, ABA browser at the moment is built on the public APIs that serve the broad data sites, right?

So along, basically, when those sites get information back, what they're getting behind the scenes is a whole bunch of data, a whole bunch of metadata that basically has a URL to the image and then you go off and load the image. And all the stuff that goes alongside that for perseverance and ingenuity is things exactly, like you said, Jake, it's camera pointing data, it is kind of time of day, it is soul, it is drive,

it is site, it is, you know, all of these wonderful things, like for perseverance, you know, you get filtered data. So which filter is currently active, like all of these wonderful bits of metadata that someone can then go and use and it's exactly what I'm using for the site order to try and group them together. That gets a lot harder if you go back to curiosity. It's still logical and it's still obviously incredibly well thought out. But the work that has clearly gone in

to making that way more consistent and accessible for people on perseverance, it's a huge amount of work that's happened, but it is really paying off clearly for a lot of people. And yeah, it's huge. And then obviously when you go back to things like spirit and opportunity, they don't have at the moment really a public-facing kind of API like a raw image site like a like a, like a perseverance or ingenuity or curiosity does. So all of that data then is then stored over in the PDS, so in the kind of archivist. Oh, yeah. I've heard that's fun to work with.

Yeah, it's an interesting one. It's quirky. But, you know, it's all there if you know how to look around it. So at the moment, like with the Cassini stuff, the VMC stuff and the Spirit and Opportunity stuff, all of that is coming from the PDS. So basically what I've done is going to get the metadata information from label files, which are essentially files that live alongside the raw images. and kind of tell you everything about it.

And in most cases, it's like five times as much information as you would get from the raw image feed. So you can always dig down and do that. One of the issues with the PDS is that it's not always up to date. So, for instance, the VMC missions, I think, if this is wrong, please someone correct me. But I think the VMC mission images on the PDS only go up to, I think, the end of 2020 currently,

which is why my site only has things up to the end of 2020, because I have no idea what's going on. Yeah, they do like release. I think, right? Like, they, like, dump, like, a big block of data at a time. Right. I think that's the thing. So, so, yeah, I mean, comparing them age-wise is, like, age-wise, is, like, you know, the more modern we get, the easier it's certainly getting. And the fact that someone or a group of people have clearly fought for that to happen is pretty amazing. It's good, because they're also a lot prettier, so I would hope that they don't get lost to, like, some horrible file formats or something. That's good. Do you see differences in like different instruments?

Like is the mass cam Z team better than the nav cam team? Ooh, spicy. You know, is there like, spicy? Is there like better? Yeah. Sturred some drama up. No pressure, Matt. This is going directly to the mission teams because we've either had several of them on the show in the past or have direct lines to them.

I got Jim Bell on the line right now. So I'm just waiting for you to. This is terrifying stuff. There is definitely a difference. but from my point of view, having camera pointing information like we get on MassCAM is phenomenal because then it solves exactly the problem you were talking about, which is, okay, this panorama that they've taken is 200 images.

How do I look at that in the same frame and understand what that's doing? So being able to have that camera pointing information allows someone like me to kind of exactly like you see on screen now, kind of put those together into a kind of nice panorama. The edges are a little bit funky. at the moment the seams need work, but it's basically how it would look, right? So having that's really useful. It is better than like I would pull off with the iPhone Pan-O mode if I was there.

So, you know, there's no like weird person's face that got squished in the middle of it. Yeah, like a really long dog. Yeah. Now, that would be a real humdinger for the whole, that weird part of Twitter that like sees an animal and everything. Yeah. Imagine that sounded like a stung, a long dog on Mars. just like panoramic problems or something like that. That's how we find out.

It'll be very much. We can't confirm life because are dogs shaped like that? We don't know. Low gravity dogs are really long, I guess. It's like, imagine a dachshund way bigger. Nice. Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, so it's super, you know,

it's super useful to have the information. Some cameras don't have that, but some cameras don't need that kind of information, certainly, to kind of merge together. You don't get panoramas of every. thing. Like comparing missions maybe is more precise because looking at the curiosity data, currently you don't get that camera model information back with the curiosity feed, which is why I don't

currently for the curiosity mission have any panoramas. I need to figure out how to go and get that data, which is probably something called Spice, which is a library you can use to kind of calculate a whole bunch of interesting particular kind of mission-based stuff in Python. So sites like MarsLife.org at the moment is a really good alternative to that where you can go and see those panoramas in kind of wonderful, kind of, you know, easy to browse kind of ways, which is just fantastic. And yeah, definitely worth checking out if you're into this stuff.

Cool. Okay. And then the other way I wanted to ask that question was I know I wanted to ask, because you have, you have VMC on here, which is the visual monitoring camera. This is that like engineering camera turned science camera on Mars Express. So this camera was like one job was to, was to photograph the Beagle 2 lander. it separated in like 2002 or whatever and then just to make sure that it separated and that was its one job and then they turned it into a science camera. I've heard the metadata on this is like

basically non-existent. What can you even do with that one? Right. So it's an interesting one. So I've always kind of wanted to have something in orbit in area browser because that's you know the ideally the three stages are you know on the ground kind of in the air in orbit around it and then you know kind of maybe under the ground with inside or kind of looking at data from like other things, or like just really close to the ground, maybe. So there's certain kind of levels to Mars to kind of think about this data in and having VMC in orbit is fantastic to get in.

But like you said, there's not a huge amount of metadata other than really exposure I'm using at the moment in order to try and group things. So at the moment when you go on a page, an item in there, you see they're all grouped by exposure. So at the bottom it tells you the exposure time for each one of those kind of sequences or single views. So that's kind of like the most base level immediately obvious thing to do with this.

I think what you can do with something like Spice is you can then get additional, you can calculate the camera pointing data, which might allow me to do things that are a bit closer to Juno Observer in order to kind of project this stuff down onto a 3D planet, at which point you can kind of create panoramas and things like that that don't exist from these sequences. I mean, the good thing about a lot of these sequences, not necessarily all of them, but a lot of them is that the movement of Mars in shot is quite significant.

So there is actually, if you were to stitch those together, there's probably something quite nice you can get. Yeah, it's a perfect example. Good work. It's like the perfect example. You can make that into it like a fantastic panorama there. Obviously, the quality is quite low on the VMC. It was never designed for this kind of stuff.

But I do kind of love it for the fact that it's just pulling back all these crazy images of Mars, right? It's just fantastic. Yeah, I love it too because it's just like such a come-up and story. It's just like, It's just like 20 years later this thing It's like I'm still doing science Even though I have no job I feel like Tian Wenz is going to be in the same boat

Right where there's been randomly The coolest Mars imagery all year coming out Like oh yeah we shot this image of you know I forget what was it was it separation event That they finally like released imagery of You know what I'm talking about Wasn't this a couple like a month ago or something The arm the shots they had

They had for Lunar New Year right So like they had That's probably I'm thinking stick. Oh, that's what I'm thinking of. Yes. Check it out. You can see like the, you know, the North Polar layer deposit just kind of casually strolling by in the back.

You're like, hello. But they previously only released imagery at separation. That's what I'm thinking of. Like that was the camera they used to show. There goes Arlander. And then now it's still doing cool imagery. Right. Right, right.

Yeah, yeah. And they had that one when they went into orbit too. There was like that one where they, they like, it was like during the insertion burn. Yeah, right. It was like filming, which is also kind of. insane. But yeah, yeah.

Yikes. Okay, I have lots of questions. I was going to say, can we get to some of the terrain stuff because that would be awesome. Yeah, one more rober question and then we can go to terrain stuff? Okay, okay. So the stitching and stuff, can you handle all that programmatically? Like is the data coming in, your app is just being like, here's how that goes together? Or are you intervening in any way to this stuff?

So essentially what you have to do, it's like if you were to stitch something on your iPhone, right? It kind of has to know kind of what direction it's pointing and then some kind of things about the camera that you're taking the images with, like the lens attributes and things. At the moment, the way that I calculate panoramas is completely in 3D. So it essentially replicates the camera that's on that mission, on that instrument. And then it kind of projects it out into the world and kind of sticks it on this kind of sphere that's around the side. So the good thing of doing it that way with essentially a physical camera model is that you lose a whole bunch of distortion. If people scroll through the site and stuff, if you see kind of some particularly early mass cam mosaics and, you know, some of the bigger ones. Occasionally at the bottom of the images, you'll see the kind of images themselves, like the tiny bits that make it up, will be really curved at the edges.

And that's kind of this undistortion that's kind of automatically happening by kind of replicating this in 3D. I don't have to kind of manually go in and do that. It's kind of just happening as part and parcel of the process. So, yeah, it's quite a nice, easy way to do things to get that stitching correctly. And then hopefully down the line, it kind of allows me the opportunity to do things with, like, you know, AR and all that kind of stuff as well, because I'm doing it in basically a sphere at that point. So it can just be around you because it's kind of that anyway. We're just looking at a flat version of it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Okay, cool. Wow, that's so neat. I wish I was smarter with this data stuff because there's so many cool things you can do with it it's you know there's plenty of space for everybody to do I think yeah it's back off he's saying back off Jake stick to the podcast stick to the audio content

I mean admittedly if Jake was good at this stuff he would get nothing else done so that is definitely the danger like you know I mean I do like I have freelance work and stuff like that this is all done spare time kind of free time evenings weekends and stuff And that is dangerous kind of like having that lying there because he needs data downloading the background

thinking I have to get through several days of freelance work before I can then go and look at this stuff. Yeah, I understand that struggle, trust me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're talking to you guys who know all about turning their hobbies into jobs. Yeah, totally. This one's really cool with the actual tracks of the rover.

You know, the high-res stitching of this pretty awesome. Yeah, there's definitely some, you know, there's a bunch of room for improvement, but it's kind of interesting. interesting thing at the bottom of this, on the bar at the bottom, so in the left-hand corner it says left and debaired. So what this is, it's a panorama that also has an associated right-side view too. So you can kind of view these kind of various versions of the panorama within the same image. So whereas this is, I think it's 28 images it says on the bottom bar. So it's 28 images grouped

together in a way where you only have to look at one. So it's, yeah, a little bit. I noticed some of the photos of the, where you can see the rover body itself. where the right and left channels are pretty cool because you get the kind of shifting aspect of a shifting viewpoint of the rover itself, which is very cool to see exactly where these are coming from. Right, totally. There's something about these kind of images that, I don't know, I always, we talked about this a lot where like the images with a spacecraft in them are just infinitely cooler than the ones of just Mars. Right. Yeah, completely agree. There's something like really emotional about them I find

Like just like even you know the vigniating in the side the color great of it all It's just really kind of filming yeah this one looks like an awesome sci-fi movie Yeah totally that's awesome yep Terrain I'm just talking about this terrain imagery Yeah we should we should I want to talk about how I can zoom into this Frickin crazy Because I just like I'm just like what about this what about this? So you mentioned that you were, did you start out with high-rise data specifically?

That's where everything kind of got its start. And is this a descendant of that? Yeah, it is. So essentially, ARIA browser started with me kind of after I did that kind of leaving full-time VFX. I gave myself kind of 20 days to try and get the entirety of the high-rise data set online, viewable in 3D. It kind of just managed it. So I had to kind of convert it at that point. easy break after leaving the full-time job.

You know, relax, whatever. But it was doable. It was interesting. Definitely learned a lot about things I liked and things I didn't like. But it was a good project. And at the time, I was making a bunch of 3D models in order to get them in front of you and display them in the browser. So I was doing a huge amount of preprocessing.

And everything you loaded would be a bit small because you were loading a 3D model. Whereas now this new version, essentially, it generates all the models in the browser, which is why it can be quite quick. If you kind of just toggle between a bunch of them on the left, it will load them in pretty quickly. And it means that I'd have to do less pre-processing, which is fantastic, and the results are also better. So it's basically a win-win all the way around.

But yeah, it all started with the high-rise information, with that data set specifically, and then kind of just expanded from there. Are you layering in MOLA data with this, like the altimeter elevation stuff? Not yet. I would love to. So it's kind of the next thing on my list for the terrain data, really,

because it's pretty self-sustaining at the moment. So I want to kind of get measurement tools in, which I think would be pretty cool. And then, yeah, other bits of imagery that you can kind of drape on the top of it would be awesome as well. And I think that, I mean, it should be relatively straightforward because I have kind of all the coordinate systems of all of these models and stuff. I just need to find a good way to load again.

How do you load images in the browser to get them in 3D? It's the same problem I've just sold, but for terrain data. So I need to find a way to get those images in in kind of a quick, easy way. I think the problem with a good amount of that imagery is it can be quite large. So obviously the web is a very specific platform to try and do high power stuff on. And I'm pushing it in lots of ways that kind of don't crash most devices, which is great. But maybe viewing like massive image files is going to be. too much. So I might have to cut those down a little bit.

Can you get, like I was thinking of a really good candidate dataset for this would be the Cassise data from TGO, right? Because you're going to have a lot of, it's a stereo camera. It does the path where it shoots forward and then turns around and shoots backwards and then just puts out these 3D models kind of right off the bat, right? Right. I think so, yeah. I mean, all of that kind of stuff, I think, is just, yeah, a perfect candidate for this. There's a couple of different I'm hoping to get in.

It's just saying, you're like, yeah, man, I know there's all this data. I just haven't got to it yet. Come on, man. I just need more coffee. It's just, it's a caffeine level thing. If it can just like get that, then I'm happy. Well, is it like, yeah. I'm curious about that, though, and specifically is, is,

because I experienced this even building the much smaller scope downlink, which is just basically scribing goes data and putting on her desktop. Have it running as we speak. And it's only using NASA imagery or NOAA imagery that they also shared the imager with Jackson or JMA I guess it would be and all that data

is open and available but Europe is actually have to email somebody at UMET set to just like I've been trying to figure out where to get the full scale high-res imagery and I think I might have to pay them for it I don't really understand

the licensing terms it's all very murky and they're always even from that it seems like there's this big difference between the way that the imagery is dealt to the public from NASA and other sources NASA sets the high bar for like everything's out there, you can have everything you want, because that's the way we set it up.

Have you found that, like, is that data even available, Jake? I don't know if that's something that there is. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't have a site that I go to to look at Cassie's, like, downstream or anything like that. Yeah. I'm wondering if you ran into any of that, Matt, where there was like,

or maybe you haven't taken it on yet because of this situation that, like, stuff is very openly available from NASA and not so much from everyone else in the world yet. Right. And that could be a maturity thing. NASA's been landing stuff on Mars since the 70s. Like, you know, you can't... Sorry, Beagle, but, like, you didn't get the reps in. He just didn't get the reps in, you know?

Hey, as representative here, over here. It landed. I'm just saying you didn't get the reps in getting the imagery back, is all my point. Okay, I'll let you off. Yeah, no, totally. It's a thing. It's, you know, I was really happy when I got the HRSC data in, sorry.

because it is not a NASA source, which is fantastic. And I think the more of those I can get in, the better, because it kind of proves that point of someone outside the system can maybe do something which is cross-agency and cross-mission and all that kind of stuff, which is quite nice. But yeah, it is certainly tricky to track that down. Even the HRSC stuff, which is very kind of available and kind of relatively easy to get hold of,

it's less easy to figure out if you've got everything. So like I was having a chat on Twitter the other day And they were saying, you know, there's all of these ones that you haven't seen or don't have on the site And it's like a brand new thing to me. I have no idea Didn't know that existed. Yeah, totally. So the fact that you know, the PDS is quirky, but everything is there, which is just phenomenal. It's crazy.

So having, you know, and this isn't to discount the work that, you know, ESA's doing and stuff with kind of their image browsing and it is getting like way better and easier to use imagery. From my point of view, I just haven't played with that as much yet because like you say, there's so much. other, so many other amazing data sets to start kind of putting in and using. So yeah, it's a problem for a future Matt, I think. Okay. Well, we'll check back on you in a month and see if you've got to finish up for me.

Yeah, yeah. Because I need this. This is actually really important for me to have all this. Oh, okay. I'll make notes. We can chat. It's fine. What Jake is offering is direct line to mission teams to get your X if data changed if you need it. What he needs in return is you to finish

all the goddamn features. Trade offer. Someone can just source me some coffee. This is like... We're going to all start buying Matt some coffee. Everybody join up memberships on YouTube here for all phenomenal. Support us and we will pass the money right through to Matt by way of shipping him...

We'll convert the beer money into coffee money. I like it. Thank you. Are we doing the development bit? Are we doing the whole thing, Jake? Are we attempting the spinoff show where we talk about development for five-minute teaser? Yeah, maybe. You have to stop me talking, though.

I think that's the problem with this bit. We got a hard out, so it's okay. Okay, we do have a hard out. Okay. So maybe we'll just start with why it's felt and why not, I don't know, react or something. Like, what, you know, why do you choose that? It's like an obscure, but kind of like up-and-comer. front-end thing.

So you're going in with the really non-political question to begin with, which is fantastic. Yeah. So I have done several kind of apps for clients in React, haven't touched view, which is another framework that people use. And I like React, but I started finding that for me, personally, it started kind of getting in the way of me figuring out stuff. And I kind of am someone who really likes to get a prototype. cycle up and running and the code will be terrible, but I can kind of prove that it works,

and then I kind of re-figure out how I'm going to do it afterwards. And for me, that was just quite hard in React, and I found spelt, and I love spout. And every project I've done in the last kind of two years at this point for clients that needed to have a web component is now spout. It, for me, feels like you're just kind of writing HTML and JavaScript. I use tailwind as well, which is absolutely, again, another completely non-political thing on the internet. but I happen to love that

it's you know it services the whole getting stuff done quickly for me with the way that I build stuff just get a prototype working get something looking vaguely pretty and then kind of figure it out a little bit afterwards and for me Sveld and Terwin just are the perfect combo in that sense

cool yeah and Anthony's fallen in love with it yeah I have been like you know in the last couple years through freelance work I've done a couple of web projects where like you know former life was all web all day, every day, and then I took the side jag into the iOS world for a couple of years

and still tried to maintain tabs on where the web was at, but I had this, we've talked about this a lot, Jake, that I had this weird relationship with, like, the state of web development where, so I worked at Happy Cog for a couple of years in the late 2010s, or early 2010s, wow, my timeline's totally screwed up, which was like right at the cusp of kind of the Zeldman-inspired, decade coming to a close and all the new kids on the block getting up. And it's right when I left

to go full-time iOS and hadn't really done a lot of web projects in the intervening years. And everything has changed since. So I've come back to it now with like different eyes. And like I feel like a very old man because of where I started out. And so, you know, I did the same kind of thing that you did. Build a couple projects with React and be like, honestly, I like it more than I thought I would. I thought I would hate this entirely. But it's fine, it's passable. And then playing around with Svelt, I'm like, oh, this is, I mean, Jake, you said the other day, like, this sounds like an Anthony thing generally. And there's a compiler. I love compilers. So, like, I'm all in on that. They attempt to use the word progressive enhancement,

which is also relevant to Anthony's interests. So there was just like, it's checking a lot of boxes here. And so I'm been pretty thrilled with it so far since I've been playing with it. I'm waiting for you to go back into our direct message history because there's like, I think like two years ago. I was like, you should check out this selfie. I think you'll like it. I had to give it some time. 100% of all future projects or something like that is the key. I just had to give it a little time, Jake. Well, you know, you're going to miss out on a lot of use effect. So I hope you, I hope you're like prepared to leave use effect behind because that's, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You don't miss it, right? Yeah. Yeah. You know, whatever gets the job done for you as quickly,

possible right that's the key there you go there you go yeah yeah I'm a pragmatist at the end of the day if it works and it's not janky it's not janky needs it not be janky don't screw with my scrolling my two rules it's kind of like that's kind of like one and one B you know that's a that's like a subplot nice I would argue probably don't don't test area browsers routing capability at the moment too much if you think that kind of stuff just like don't just don't worry about that for the minute it's fine I just ignore it does a job it makes Jake's life better

which by proxy makes my life better that's all we need you know just don't just don't come in this whole you know earth imagery realm because I'm if Jake's you know not going to intrude on your ground on Mars imagery

don't make your way over to my area okay you keep it out there keep it out towards the asteroid belt stand of the desktop wallpaper space it's huge it's about to go gangbusters this year. So 2020 is the year of desktop wallpapers. So, especially on Linux. On Linux, too, right. Yeah, you've expanded. Yeah. I have not. I have not expanded. I mean,

break several people's heart by saying that. No. Sorry. Sorry. The iOS people, I'm getting to it eventually. See also the section of this show where Matt talked about getting through freelance work before doing your side projects. Yeah. Yeah. It's an issue. Okay, so maybe we were getting close to the end here. So, Matt, is there anything like cool coming up that you're building? Like, what's on the horizon for all these products? Anything fun that we can look forward to? Good question.

I'm going to buy all the domains that are like Cassini.com server. I did it. I did it already. I bought a skinny browser. It's like $5 or something. I was like, get it. It'll be fine. So, yeah, the Cassini stuff, I think, is probably the next thing that's going to be pretty awesome

if I can get that working in a usable way, like just kind of auto-merging, like, the RGB channels or like UV-I-R channels or something like that in a useful way, I think would be pretty awesome. I think the interesting thing with all this stuff, which I don't think I touched on earlier, is like feedback for all of this is, like, super key. Like, as much as it's an awesome site

that I hope is interesting, kind of the general public, and that's true of the mass stuff, the terrain stuff, the Rover stuff, the Cassini stuff. Like, I'm kind of hoping to push it in ways that are kind of useful as well to people actually working with this data on a regular basis, be they, you know, be part of the mission themselves or not.

And so feedback from those people in terms of what features are useful, because as you guys undoubtedly know, deciding which features are useful yourself leads to terrible things, potentially. So having feedback from people who actually can use it and make use of it is kind of the key bit. So, yeah, that's, you know, the casino stuff would be super awesome. And if anybody has any ideas, certainly, like at the chat or whatever,

of what could be a useful way to group that stuff, that would be pretty awesome. And then there's always kind of this to do on my list, which is just like AR stuff. And it's, you know, if I can get AR working for the train data, then suddenly that's pretty compelling, I think. Same thing for the panoramas and stuff like that with that camera pointing data we discussed earlier.

So those are going to be the two big things. But I think in the middle, in the meantime, it's kind of fix the bugs. Keep fixing the bugs. And, yeah, things like that. Yeah, I won't stop putting stuff into it until someone tells me to. so. Okay.

I'm slightly putting my hand up on, keep me posted on the AR stuff, because maybe we can hack on some little side projects together. I heard there may or may not be some products in the near future that will be highly relevant to AR and my work. So that would be fun to play with. I've heard the same thing. So yeah, absolutely, dude.

That would be cool. You two are screwed because you got glasses on already. You have to make the jump to contacts. Aren't they pretty big goggles? I don't know. I can't remember. Probably. They'll wrap around.

That'll be fine. You go like the same site. It's fine. It's clip-ons. I actually, the nice thing for me is I actually don't need glasses for AR because I'm near-sighted. So when the screen's right, you can see, it's fine. Nice.

That's a solid point. Yeah. All right. Yeah, so we're coming up on the end of it here. I don't know. Anthony, what are you working on lately? Oh, man. Well, there's this whole Artemis Lander thing that happened yesterday where NASA's.

Like we're doing the second lander. This week finally felt like there was some news for you to make podcasts about, which I know. Yeah, although I'm not going to podcast until like Monday because there's probably going to be a presidential budget on Monday. So here's my plan is I'm going to trust them that they said it's coming out on Monday. And I'm going to do the show on Monday when they release it. And if it doesn't come out on Monday, I'm going to do it Tuesday morning. And if it comes out right as I'm recording, I'll just do it again. So that's my plan.

I don't know. I think it's like it's like a cool thing. NASA doing because they're just saying you know it's like the what's the onion the Gillette onion article fuck it we're doing five blades do you remember that one I feel like it's NASA's version is like we're doing two landers fuck everything we're doing five blades this is NASA's version of that so we'll see it's going to be a battle to get the money so I'm going to be thinking about that there's some interesting implications of the way that this developed where like, you know, the people that lost that on the first round of Artemis Landers

are, are they going to come back with the same thing and try to lower the price? Are they going to do totally different things? Is Blue Origin going to break up with everybody else and try to go their own way? Is Jeff Bezos actually going to put the money in that he promised in the open letter that was kind of embarrassing a couple months ago? And remember this, SpaceX isn't competing for this one, so why lower the price? Well, the problem is, Jake, that there's going to be a presidential budget in which says a dollar amount and all of those people are going to know, guess we got to fit in that dollar amount. So that's an interesting aspect because there wasn't last time, right?

The bids were out and they said, we'll throw, you know, we'll scratch a number in here on this request and y'all write into us, let us know what you want to do. This time it's like, we're calling the shot. You're putting a $3 billion budget and you've got to figure that out. So I don't know. And it's nicely contained in this like specific line item so that Congress basically has to fund it, which is... Yeah, yeah, right.

Like, fund both or cancel one or what are you going to do here? A little bucket that says Congress's special request. Yeah, right. You either funded or you cannot run it. Yeah, you put the money in here, then you fight on which one of your constituents is going to win. Yeah, exactly. So that's what I'm working on, is doing that.

What about you? Good. So I put out my LPSC episode this week, which was really fun. It's one of those, you know, usually I do just kind of pretty straightforward interviews, but this is one where I took multiple interviews and kind of wove them together. into the story. So a little bit of music in there, a little bit of drama, a little bit of emotion. And yeah, yeah, the Venus community is spicy right now. They are excited. They're electric. They got lots going on. And it was a really fun story to tell. So you can go and listen in on what is

basically the first episode of Weevonotians. So yeah, no, it was lots of fun. That's what, Matt, this is your marker, because you've got a couple years to sort the rest your projects out before Venus data starts coming back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If anyone on the mission wants to chat, like, just get in touch. Like, you can get this going. He'd love to start the code early, is what he's saying. And give you feedback on the XF data.

Get the XF data right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you got to figure out how to work with radar because that's how it all, the Venus version of a camera is radar. So, yeah, it's funny because, like, one of the things that we talked about on that episode with some of the scientists was, you know, like these Venus people, or they're working with, like, this ancient Magellan data these days.

got like, you know, basically like no metadata that's, that's useful, right? So, like, they're, it's tough for that. It's tough. It's 75 meter resolution or some awful thing. Right. Yeah. Wow. We got some off nominal plugs to do, Jake.

We do. Number one. Yes. We should always have all those little plugs. Number one, we have YouTube memberships, and we would like you to join up so you can get in the Discord because the Discord is a lovely place to hang out with people. There's all sorts of fun events How much SLS cost today in the

Discord Many times Many times Everybody saw Whatever answer you want Yeah it's a choose your own adventure baby That So join up on YouTube

YouTube.com slash all nominal Get yourself in the Discord Support the show Add to the beer fund So we can keep this going And the coffee fund for Matt And so that you can fund The epic event that's going to happen

When SLS gets this shit together And we actually go down to Florida Which is getting closer, so you might want to start chipping in. And next week, Jake. Oh, baby next week. We are finally doing it. We're finally doing it.

We've got Tori Bruno on the show next week. It's going to be awesome. So head of ULA, Tori Bruno, coming on for phenomenal shenanigans. I think we're vaguely kind of thinking about this as an origins episode a la what we did with J.B. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, we had Jim on to talk about sort of how we got into. to the job that he had as NASA administrator. And so, you know, Tori is a perfect person

to also have that kind of conversation with because he's got tons of interesting history that I would love to open up that box. We know executive Tori, but we wanna hear about engineer Tori and we wanna get some stories out of those early days. So that'll be fun. So that's next story.

I want them to finally like tell the full story of the dynamite in the barn. In the barn. Yeah, I keep hearing, you know, sort of hinted at. What if he, what if it doesn't exist? And it's just the thing that he keeps saying, you know? He like just only ever wants to hint at it. But there's actually no payoff.

He keeps pressing him on. He's like, look, guys, I just, I made it up for a story for a podcast one time. You do a better Toy Bruno than my Leo Enright that I did before the show. I should practice it, right? I mean, I'll be ready for him. Yeah, so that's coming up next week. Pretty exciting. Yes.

What else we got? Matt, do you have anything else you would like to play? plug. You mentioned you do freelance work a bunch of time. People want to work with Matt. Where do they go? They can go to manbrilly.com. It has a little waving hand on it that will wave every few seconds at you. So that's pretty good. So yeah, anyone's got interesting kind of bits of data they want to have visualized, particularly space stuff, obviously is kind of what I'm most passionate about. But anything else is always good as well. Thank you so much. Noted. Noted in my head because it seems like a thing that should happen. All right. Thanks again, Matt.

on. Thank you so much for having me. It's been super fun. It was a classic Thursday here. Everything went swimmingly, Jake. Went great. Yeah, you got to go fill that up again. All right, everybody. See you later. Bye. Cheers.