Ice-Dust-Methane-Data-CERTIFIED
                                            





    Curiosity pic















         Gale Crater and the uncertainty of the location of the landing site















    The Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity) landed on the floor of Gale Crater on Aug. 6, 2012 at 4.6° S latitude and 222.6° W longitude. The cameras on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover were used to address the following science objectives to contribute towards characterization of the local environment in Gale Crater:
    • Characterization of inter-annual variability of different populations of water-ice clouds
    • Characterization of airborne dust and flux throughout Gale Crater


    Mars Science Laboratory Atmospheric Ice, Dust, and Methane Bundle

    Data in this bundle include observations taken from April 2022 to December 2023 (sols 3431 to 3902) for the ZM, SHM, PFSS, and CSM observations. The line-of-sight derived data extends to the beginning of the MSL mission, from sols 117 to 3663 (31 to 36 Mars years) (Note: Curiosity began counting sol equal to zero. The average solar day is 24 hr. 39 min. and 35.244 sec.)

    References
    See Grotzinger, J. P., Crisp, J., Vasavada, A. R., Anderson, R. C., Baker, C. J., Barry, R., Blake, D. F., Conrad, P., Edgett, K. S., Ferdowski, B., Gellert, R., Gilbert, J. B., Golombek, M., Gómez-Elvira, J., Hassler, D. M., Jandura, L., Litvak, M., Mahaffy, P., Maki, J., … Wiens, R. C. (2012). Mars Science Laboratory mission and science investigation. Space Science Reviews, 170(1–4), 5–56. https://doi.org/10.1007/S11214-012-9892-2 for an overview of the mission.

    See the user’s guide for additional references.

    Accessing the PDS4 Bundle

    The User’s guide provides necessary information to understand the data.

    Data in the msl_ice-dust-methane bundle are provided in two forms: the data_derived collection contains values for the reported data and interpretations of the observations, and the documents collection contains movies (GIFTS) for observations that have been post-processed and are ready for use and interpretation.

    The derived data collection consists of CSV tables (line_of_sight, suprahorizon_movie, and zenith_movie) supported by movies (cloud-shadow-movie, pfss-movie, suprahorizon-movie, zenith-movie) that are available in the document collection (Note: the labels of the individual movies include the sol).

    Downloading the data

    Compressed file of the bundle – ask Lynn about this

    Citing the Dataset for Publication

    PDS recommendations for citing datasets can be found here

    J. Moores and E. Dong (2024), Mars Science Laboratory Atmospheric Ice, Dust, and Methane Bundle, NASA Planetary Data System, https://doi.org/10.17189/aytb-wq72