marslabWe have released an alpha version of a general-purpose
scientific library called marslab. We wrote
marslab primarily to help fill gaps in our
Python-based workflows for multispectral imaging data collected
by Mars rovers, but it contains utilities that might be useful
in a much wider range of contexts, including:
marslab in the near future.
A TESS Guest Investigator project led by Chase Million has been selected for inclusion in Cycle 4. "Using AF Psc To Test Flare Energy Partitions With TESS And Swift" will observe the active flare star AF Psc in TESS 20-second cadence mode with several hours of coordinated simultaneous observations in Swift's U-band event mode and XRT. We expect to observe at least one large flare across multiple electromagnetic regimes at high time resolution, providing a rare measurement of flare energy partitions and temporal evolution. Fast quasi-periodic pulsations (QPP) have previously been detected on flares in UV GALEX observations of AF Psc [Doyle et al. 2018] and in TESS observations of other stars [Million et al. 2021], so there is a possibility of also capturing the first multi-band, fast cadence observation of a QPP on a star other than the Sun. Scott Fleming (Space Telescope Science Institute), Isaiah Tristan (University of Colorado), and Adam Kowalski (University of Colorado) are collaborators on the effort.
pdr) PDARTNASA's Planetary Data Archiving, Restoration, and Tools
(PDART) program has selected Million Concepts' proposal to
fully develop the Planetary Data
Reader (pdr). This Python-based software tool
will provide an easy, well-documented, thoroughly-tested,
single-point solution for reading the enormous quantity -- over
two petabytes -- of observational planetary science data
currently stored in the Planetary Data System. The project PI
is Chase Million. Michael St. Clair (Million Concepts) and
Michael Aye (LASP) are co-investigators. Jordan Padams (PDS ENG
Node, JPL) is a collaborator.
Michael St. Clair led a poster presentation at the 52nd
Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, describing the
process and technology around our recent
conversion of the Chandrayaan-1 M3 from PDS3 to PDS4
format.
You
can read the poster here.
Chase Million led a poster presentation at the Cool
Stars 20.5 conference, presenting the first discovery of
fast (< 5 minute) quasi-periodic pulsations in the TESS
20-second mode data. These measurements were made on
observations of nearby M Dwarfs that were requested as part of
a GI proposal, also led by Million.
You can read the
poster here.
picks: occasional imaging utilitiesWe have released a small collection of web-based utilities that may be useful to people attempting to work with imaging data like those provided by the Mars 2020 Raw Image site. These include the capability to split and combine three-channel images and to decompose RGGB bayer pattern images into their component filters.
We have released a beta version of pdr, the
Planetary Data Reader. pdr has the ambitious goal
of making every file and product in the complex, diverse
ecology of planetary data instantly ready for analysis in
standard Python workflows. It already supports an overwhelming
majority of the data hosted in the Planetary Data System (PDS)
archives. It
is available on Github. Try pdr.read(filename)
and see what happens. We'd love your comments, requests, and
bug reports.
Under contract from the United States Geological Survey, Million Concepts has produced Planetary Data System 4 (PDS4) bundles containing new versions of:
Our new versions of these crucial lunar data are highly usable and designed to be easily-maintainable for many more decades.
The data are still in peer review at the PDS. See our project page for links to documentation, software, and videos that show the glitchy delights of the Clementine EDR.
Chase Million and Michael St. Clair have joined the Mars 2020 mission as Collaborators on the Science Team. They will develop software to assist with the scientific analysis of rover data under the direction of Mastcam-Z Co-I Melissa Rice (Western Washington University).
NASA's Astrophysics Data Analysis Program (ADAP) has
selected Million Concepts' proposed GLCat (GALEX Legacy
Catalog) project for funding, with our founder Chase Million as
PI and in collaboration with Luciana Bianchi (JHU). GLCat will
be a massive catalog of all unique extended and point sources
detected by the orbital ultraviolet (UV) Galaxy Evolution
Explorer (GALEX) telescope during its decade-long mission.
GLCat will be the most extensive UV sky catalog ever produced,
correcting critical issues with earlier GALEX catalogs and
including several million new seconds of imaging coverage that
have not previously been released in a usable format. We expect
it to become an enabling component for scientific
investigations in multiple sub-disciplines of astronomy for
years to come, and also be a key resource in the design and
planning of future ultraviolet astronomy missions. GLCat will
build on and vastly extend the scope of our existing GFCat (GALEX Flare
Catalog) and gPhoton projects,
enable the discovery of UV phenomena
visible only at very high time resolution.
Read excerpts from
our proposal for more information.
Chase Million has been selected as a 2021 Better Scientific Software (BSSw) Fellow. As a fellowship project, he will develop tools and techniques for generating realistic and useful software project estimates that account for the unique circumstances of scientific research. This project is based on workflows already in use within Million Concepts and follows from a workshop on the same topic that Chase presented at the first OpenPlanetary Virtual Conference (OPvCon) in June 2020.
Million Concepts will be working with PI Matthew Siegler (Planetary Science Institute), Jianqing Feng (Planetary Science Institute), and Paul Hayne (CU Boulder) on a research project recently selected for funding by the Lunar Data Analysis program. The project, "Thermal and Dielectric Properties From the Chang'e-2 Microwave Radiometer," focuses on recalibrating the CE-2 data set and finding synergies between these corrected data and data from other instruments (such as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's Diviner radiometer). This new fused data set will enable us to produce more accurate maps of the dielectric qualities and subsurface composition of the Moon than have ever previously been released. This is our third research collaboration with Dr. Siegler, and we are pleased to be continuing to lend our analysis expertise to his groundbreaking work on lunar geology. Read our proposal for more detail on the project.
As output from the GFCat project, Chase Million presented a catalog of GALEX photometric measurements reprocessed from their original 25-minute visit depths to 2-minute cadence. This catalog enables the systematic search of fast stellar variability in the ultraviolet across the entire GALEX corpus. A video of the talk can be found here. A Jupyter Notebook with example workflows is here.
Chase Million organized the first OpenPlanetary Virtual Conference (OPvCon), and also presented a two-hour workshop on Research Software Project Management.
The Apollo 15/17 Heat Flow Experiment Concatenated Data archive are now available at the PDS Geoscience Node. Read more about this effort here.
Chase Million presented an initial sample of 400 GALEX light curves with significant (>6-sigma) time-domain variability on timescales less than approx. 30 minutes. The poster can be viewed here.
Chase Million and Michael St. Clair have joined the Mars Science Laboratory mission as Collaborators on the Science Team. They will develop software to assist with the scientific analysis of rover multispectral data under the direction of Melissa Rice (Western Washington University).
Michael St. Clair presented at the 4th Planetary Data Workshop on improvements to the Apollo 15 and 17 Heat Flow Experiment (HFE) data archive.
As a NASA iTech Finalist, Chase Million attended the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in The Hague, the Netherlands. See our NASA iTech presentation here.