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RedPlanet

RedPlanet is an open-source Python library for working with various Mars geophysical datasets. We aim to streamline data analysis/visualization workflows for beginners and experts alike, so you spend less time hunting/wrangling data and more time doing cool science! :) (1)

  1. Fun story: I recently spent 6 hours on a Saturday trying to find/compute a high-resolution (greater than 1x1 degree) Bouguer anomaly dataset.

    I have intermediate knowledge of search engine techniques, and I like to think I'm not completely incompetent (you can judge for yourself based on my work on this package/website) — but I was still tearing my hair out on what should have been a simple task.

    Resources such as pyshtools (both the software and documentation website) and Zenodo are shining examples of how we can make our analysis workflows more accessible/reproducible and increase our scientific productivity. I hope RedPlanet can contribute to that ecosystem.

 

Key Features

(citations are missing from here until I figure out how I'm handling that)

  • Crater database which unifies [1] comprehensive database of craters D>=1km, [2] crater ages from both Hartmann and Neukum isochron-fitting, and [3] official/up-to-date IAU crater names.
  • Digital elevation models up to 200m resolution with memory-mapping, parallelization, and chunking for high-performance.
  • Mohorovičić discontinuity (crust-mantle interface) models and derived crustal thickness maps — models are parameterized by north/south crustal density, reference interior models, and crustal thickness beneath the InSight lander with a total of ~20,000 valid combinations.
  • Magnetic source depth data from spherical harmonic inversions.
  • Heat flow and Curie depth calculations from gamma-ray spectroscopy (GRS) data.
  • (Planned for future) MAVEN magnetometer data, filtered for nighttime and low-altitude.

 

Here's a sample plot generated with RedPlanet:

 

Online Demo

Open in Colab

Whether you're a beginner who's never installed Python before or an advanced user who'd like a demo before installing, Google Colab is a great way to try all the features of RedPlanet completely in your browser without installing anything! Just open the link above.