National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has made substantial advancements in planetary science in recent decades. NASA works very closely with The United States Geological Survey (USGS) for all their data processing needs, so much so that the USGS has spent thirty years developing the Integrated System for Imagers and Spectrometers (ISIS).
The ISIS3 software is a binary data analysis tool for reading NASA’s data files that were generated by Deep Space Imagers. We are Team Orion, and we have been given the task of tackling the Planetary Image Caption Writer Project sponsored by USGS. Team Members include Brandon Kindrick, as the Team Leader, Yuxuan Zhu, as Code Designer and Chadd Frasier, as Version Controller.
Using the current ISIS3 software, our client, Dr. Laszlo Kestay takes data files from NASA and prepares them for research publications. The problem is that our client’s process can take anywhere from 1 to 2 hours for a single publication image on account of requiring multiple image processing softwares to add the important icons. This makes creating legible figures for all audiences more difficult and sometimes prevents images from making it to publication. The images that are cropped using ISIS will need to go into another editing software to add things such as scale bars or a north arrow. This is limiting the audience to mostly professionals and makes dissecting articles more difficult for the everyday reader. He finds himself often not wanting to add images to publications because it would be too difficult to make the image legible for all audiences, instead opting for a larger, less specific image.
He would like have a much easier way of cropping and adding important icons, like a scale bar or a north arrow, to the images. Dr. Kestay is also very keen on the idea of making the ISIS3 software available on a Windows machine which is not possible with the current version. In order to create a fast and easy tool that works on all platforms, we will be designing a web application that will allow the server to do the calculations using ISIS3 while the user can have the speed of a web app interface for image processing.