NASAView provides a Graphical User Interface (GUI) enabling users to view PDS label products. This section describes how to use NASAView. The following topics can be found in this section:
In order to execute NASAView on Solaris and Linux machines, the user's environment must be configured appropriately. Windows and Mac OS X users, however, do not need to setup their environment. This section describes how to setup the user environment on Solaris and Linux machines. The commands for setting environment variables must not contain spaces or line continuation characters in the value for the variable.
This section details the environment setup for Linux and Solaris machines. The following steps need to be performed:
Set the UIDPATH Environment Variable
The UIDPATH environment variable is used by Motif to locate the NASAView resource file named nasaview.uid.
The following command demonstrates setting the UIDPATH environment variable by appending to its current setting. In this example, the nasaview.uid file is located in the nasaview directory:
[node:~] setenv UIDPATH ${UIDPATH}:$HOME/nasaview/%U [node:~] echo $UIDPATH
Note: The %U symbol must be used when setting the UIDPATH environment variable. This represents a value that is substituted at runtime by NASAView.
Set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH Environment Variable
The LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable is used to locate the NASAView-dependent libraries. The following command demonstrates how to set this variable, by appending to its current setting.
This example appends the location of the NASAView-dependent libraries found in the nasaview directory:
[node:~] setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH ${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:$HOME/nasaview [node:~] echo $LD_LIBRARY_PATH
Once the UIDPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variables have been set, the tool can be executed as demonstrated in the following example:
[node: /home/user/nasaview] ./nasaview <optional PDS label file specification>
There are no environment variables that need to be set in order to execute NASAView on a Mac OS X machine. To launch the application, double-click the NASAView executable file.
There are no environment variables that need to be set in order to execute NASAView on a Windows machine. All the dependency files for NASAView should be sitting in the same location as the NASAView executable file.
The preferred method to run NASAView is to double-click the NASAView executable file. The alternative method is to specify the NASAView executable file through the command-line as demonstrated in the following example:
C:\nasaview> nasaview <optional PDS label file specification>
This section is intended to provide users with helpful tips on how to use NASAView when it opens more 'elaborate' PDS labels: labels that do not simply have just a single IMAGE or TABLE object.
This section provides documentation on how to use NASAView against more elaborate PDS labels, such as:
Displaying Multiple Objects
When there are multiple objects in a PDS label, NASAView automatically determines which object to display, using the following rules:
In order to display the rest of the objects, use the Previous Table/Next Table buttons (only applies to TABLE objects) and/or use the Object Hierarchy menu option. See the Using the Object Hierarchy Menu Option for more details.
Displaying a Multi-banded Image
Before a multi-banded image is displayed, the multi-banded image GUI window appears. See the Multi-banded Image Interface for more information on how to use this interface.
The band strengths must be set to at least 1, otherwise unexpected behavior will result.
The Object Hierarchy menu option is used to display other objects found in a PDS label. This menu option is most commonly used when a PDS label contains both an IMAGE and a TABLE object. This section describes how to use this menu option.
Open the Object Hierarchy Window
Go to the Label menu in the menu bar and select the Object Hierarchy option. When you do this, a new window should appear:
Double-click the Object To Be Displayed
Place the mouse pointer over the object to be displayed and double-click the mouse. At this point, another window will appear:
Push the Open This Table button.
In this example, the Table Display window should appear after the button is pushed. If an IMAGE object was selected, then the image will automatically be displayed.
NASAView provides an automated method of opening multiple PDS labels in a directory. This section describes how to use the automated browsing feature of NASAView.
Select the Automated CD Browse option from the File menu of NASAView. A new window should appear:
Select a directory then click OK. Another window will open to select the browse options:
This window contains the following options:
For example, if the desire is to open files that end in .LBL, enter LBL in the text box.
If the Perform Timed Browse option is selected, a window should appear:
This window will be present during an auto browse session. The following options are available:
If the Perform Timed Browse option is not selected, one of two manual browser control windows will appear:
This window will be displayed if the file to be displayed contains a PDS label or has a detached label associated with it.
This window contains the following buttons:
The other manual browser control window that could be displayed is the following:
This window will be displayed if the selected file does not have a displayable image or table associated with its label.
This window contains the following buttons:
The Graphical User Interface (GUI) of NASAView allows the user to display and examine Planetary Data System (PDS) archive products. After launching the tool, the NASAView main window should appear on the user's desktop:
This window is what a user would see if running on a Windows machine. For users running on Solaris, Linux, and a Mac OS X, the main window will look different. The window will appear more native to the target platform to give the user an expected look-and-feel for that machine.
The main window consists of the following menus:
The Print Setup and Print menu options are disabled and not functional at this time.
The Undo option is not functional at this time.
Except for multi-banded images, all images are displayed in 255 shades of gray. An image with pixel values ranging from 0 to 254 has one shade for each value. An image with a range from 0 to 1016 has one shade for every 4 values. An image with a range of 0 to 101,600 has one shade for every 400 values. If in the case of this last image the actual range was 101,092 to 101,600, a lot of the detail would be lost because all the data is in the last 508 values, which would be represented by only 2 shades of gray. If this image is normalized, the new range is now 0 to 508. This new range would yield 1 shade of gray for every 2 pixel values. This would bring out more detail.
Stretching an image tends to improve image detail. Some images appear completely obscure until they are stretched and may show a lot of detail after stretching.
This window tells the user the total number of lines and line samples in the image and what ranges are currently being displayed. Given this information, input the desired ranges for the lines and line samples in the 4 white boxes located to the right of the screen. Click OK when finished. NASAView will display the image with the user specified ranges in a new image window.
This menu option also allows a user to display other objects in a PDS label.
When an IMAGE/QUBE object is displayed, the following options are available:
As shown in the above window, there are 3 controls that allow adjustment of the distribution. The top control, labeled Median, allows the median of the data to be moved through the 256 available values of a pixel. The middle control, labeled Minimum, allows the minimum value to be redefined, causing the low end of the data to be clipped. The bottom control, labeled Maximum, allows the maximum value to be redefined, causing the high end of the data to be clipped.
The buttons found on the right allows the user to apply the following palettes: Greyscale, Red-Orange, Blue-Grey, Prism, Topo, Ramp, and Contour.
The Parse Times as Seconds and Show Integers as Unsigned Hex menu options are not functional at this time.
When TEXT files are displayed, the following options are available:
Although the Font menu option appears, it is not functional at this time.
This section describes the Table Display GUI interface when a TABLE object is opened in NASAView. When a TABLE object is opened, a window should appear similar to the following:
NASAView displays one column of data at a time. The indicator at the top tells which column is currently being displayed. In addition, 15 rows of data is displayed at a time.
The right of the screen shows two sets of information. The top-half represents information about the TABLE object and the bottom-half represents information about the current COLUMN/BIT COLUMN object being displayed.
The Table Display window features the following check boxes:
When this box is checked, the Previous Column and Next Column buttons are used to display the previous and next item, respectively. The Item Number: x of y display found to the right of this check box indicates which item is being displayed, where x represents the current item on display and y represents the total number of items.
Un-checking this box will stop the Previous Column or Next Column buttons from displaying the previous and next item, respectively.
When this box is checked, the data of the first BIT COLUMN object found in the current COLUMN object will be displayed. The Previous Column and Next Column buttons are used to display the previous and next bit column, respectively. At the top of the screen, it will show the current bit column being displayed.
Un-checking this box returns the display back to the data of the current COLUMN object.
Note: If this box is checked and there are no BIT COLUMN objects inside the current data on display, then the Previous Column and Next Column buttons will not work. The Show Bit Columns box will need to be un-checked in order for these buttons to work again.
The Table Display window features the following buttons:
As an example, if column 10 is currently being displayed and a 5 is entered, column 15 will be displayed. If a -3 is entered, column 7 will be displayed.
As an example, if 10 is entered, then rows 10 through 25 of the data will be displayed.
This button is not intended to search across both BIT COLUMN and COLUMN objects. The Show Bit Columns box must be selected first before attempting to use this button to search for BIT COLUMN objects with a specific name. In addition, this button will only search the set of BIT COLUMN objects within the current COLUMN object. It will not look to the BIT COLUMNS within the next COLUMN object and so forth to look for the specified name.
This section describes the GUI interface when a multi-banded image is being opened in NASAView. When a multi-banded image is being opened, a window like the following should appear before the image is displayed:
The window consists of buttons to increase/decrease the band strength and band intensity for red, green, and blue.
The buttons that control the band strength for each color increase/decrease by 1 with each click of the button.
Note: The band strengths should never be set to 0. Unexpected behavior will occur.
The buttons that control the band intensity for each color increase/decrease by 0.1 with each click of the button.
Alternatively, there are text boxes found to the right of the buttons where the band strengths and intensities can be entered manually.
The Apply Selections button is used to apply the current settings to the image and displays it. The current settings are found to the left of the buttons.
At this point, there seems to be a common error when using NASAView on some Linux platforms. When the "Open Object" menu option is selected, a File Chooser GUI window appears to prompt the user to select a file. At this point, multiple error messages like the following appear on the user terminal window:
Warning: Name: FilterText Class: XmTextField Character '\165' not supported in font. Discarded. Warning: Name: FilterText Class: XmTextField Character '\170' not supported in font. Discarded. Warning: Name: FilterText Class: XmTextField Character '\57' not supported in font. Discarded.
When this occurs, the GUI window does not behave properly. The user will be unable to choose a file or select another directory to browse.
The exact cause of the issue is unknown, but in the cases seen, the error was due to the LANG environment variable being set to en_US.UTF-8. This represents the installation default locale. It is believed that certain versions of Motif, the X window manager, have an issue with this environment variable setting.
The solution that has been known to work is to change the LANG environment variable to en_US or C.
The following command sets the LANG environment variable to en_US
[node:~] setenv LANG en_US [node:~] echo $LANG
There are a few quirks to be aware of when running NASAView on the Mac OS X platform.
Image Display
Due to a bug in the XVT software, images on the Mac platform will only be displayed up to about 2000 lines x 2000 line samples. The rest of the image can be viewed using the Large Image Selection menu. Refer to the Tool Interface section for a detailed description on this menu option.
PDS CD Volume Support
On the Mac platform, NASAView crashes after selecting a label or image file located on a CD from one of the older PDS Volumes. The error message that appears is the following:
FATAL ERROR: MSG 0x003482ec [CAT 3/4 STD 33516] Category: XVT release 3 assert (Signaled assert 4) Function: XVT_app_create File: /Users/build_user/builds/dsc_osx/svn/src/ ptk/mac/kfsys.c line: 411
Volume Sets that are known to cause this error are CDs of Magellan, Viking Orbiter, Voyager, and Galileo REDR images or labels. The work around is to copy the files from the CD to the local Mac machine running NASAView.