Parses & combines Martian data sources

Mars Data is a Rust command-line tool and library that:

• Fetches live surface weather from NASA's Curiosity rover (REMS instrument) and prints a per-sol report.
• Calculates the speed-of-light communications delay between Earth and Mars (one-way and round-trip) for the current moment.

The weather data is read from the public Mars Science Laboratory feed, so no API key or configuration is required.

There's weather on another planet right now — frost, wind, dust, a sunrise over a cold red desert 200 million kilometres away — and the readings are public, free for anyone to pull down.

But the raw feed makes that harder than it should be: numbers arrive as strings, missing readings hide behind a "--" sentinel, nothing is typed. Mars Data clears that away and hands you clean, typed readings — so you can stop wrangling JSON and just watch the weather on Mars.

Before you begin, ensure you have met the following requirements:

• Rust 1.96 or newer (latest stable recommended) – How to install Rust
• An internet connection (the weather report fetches live data)

git clone https://github.com/Snowda/Mars-Data.git
cd Mars-Data
cargo build --release

Run it:

cargo run

Print the latest sol as JSON instead of a console report:

cargo run -- --json

This prints the latest sol as a typed JSON document. Numeric fields are real numbers (not strings), categorical fields are enums, and missing readings are simply omitted:

{
  "terrestrial_date": "2025-09-10",
  "sol": 100,
  "min_temp": -80.0,
  "max_temp": -10.0,
  "min_ground_temp": -96.0,
  "max_ground_temp": 10.0,
  "pressure": 750.0,
  "pressure_change_direction": "Rising",
  "mars_season": 5,
  "abs_humidity": 0.3,
  "wind_speed": 12.0,
  "wind_direction": "NW",
  "atmo_opacity": "Sunny",
  "uv_index": "Moderate",
  "season": "month 5",
  "sunrise": "06:00:00",
  "sunset": "18:00:00"
}

Serve the weather as an HTTP API:

cargo run -- serve

This starts a server (default 0.0.0.0:3000, configurable via host and port in config.toml) that refreshes the latest sol hourly:

• GET /health — liveness check (returns 200 OK)
• GET /weather — latest sol as JSON (returns 503 until the first fetch completes)

Example of what it reports:

• Earth–Mars communications delay (one-way and round-trip)
• Terrestrial date and Martian sol
• Minimum / maximum air and ground temperature (°C)
• Atmospheric pressure and its trend (rising / falling)
• Absolute humidity, wind speed and direction
• UV irradiance index and atmospheric opacity
• Martian season, sunrise and sunset

Run the test suite and linter:

cargo test
cargo cranky

The latest sol is deserialized into a strongly-typed WeatherSample, with enums for wind direction, atmospheric opacity, UV index, and pressure trend, and chrono types for dates and times. Missing values (the feed's "--" sentinel) are represented as None.

• Live feed only. Every run fetches the current sol from NASA over the network — there is no offline cache or bundled data, so the tool needs an internet connection to do anything useful.
• Single rover. Only Curiosity (MSL/REMS) is supported. The historical PDS archive and other missions are on the roadmap, not yet implemented.
• Latest sol only. Reports cover the most recent published sol; there is no querying of past sols or date ranges.
• Server freshness is hourly. The serve mode refreshes once an hour and returns 503 on /weather until the first fetch completes.
• Upstream-dependent. Field availability and naming follow NASA's feed; if the feed changes shape or goes down, affected fields surface as None rather than an error.

• Source Migration
  • Migrate off the retired InSight feed to the live Curiosity (MSL) feed
  • Add the PDS archive as a source — https://atmos.nmsu.edu/PDS/data/mslrem_1001/
• Data Engineering
  • Create a JSON output
  • API output
  • Database Integration
  • Forecast upcoming weather from historical sols
• Frontend
  • Replace console output
  • Website frontend
• Data Story
  • Add satellite imagery

1. Mars Science Laboratory – Curiosity (REMS) – live feed: https://mars.nasa.gov/rss/api/?feed=weather&category=msl&feedtype=json
2. Mars Science Laboratory – Curiosity – PDS archive (planned)

Found a bug or have a question? Open an issue.

Pull requests are warmly welcome!!!

For major changes, please open an issue first and let's talk about it. We are all ears!