vectorTimes

Introduction:

vectorTimes is an executable that can pull out the collection times from a vector archive and output a sorted list in a format that can be used directly with the Orbits module to get the location of the satellite at the collection time.

Execution Example:

./vectorTimes <inputVectorPath> <outputTimesPath> <format>

This will extract all the collection event times, format them as "hyph_str", and sort them from oldest to newest for use with Orbits modules.

Format

The time information stored in the attributes tables is often not precise enough so we extract the time from the image id. Currently, we support the formats for infoterra and geofuse. When using other satellites you may need to add other formats to the list. We use two simple tools to remove extraneous characters:

    int trim = <number of characters extract from the beginning>
    std::vector <int> eraseTemplate = <vector of character indices to erase individually>

These two tools can support most image id formats fairly easily.

Range

Optionally, you can add "-range" as the last argument to output only the first and last time in the sorted set. This can be used to set the t0 and t1 parameters for Orbits.py

Output

The output file name is user defined but should end with "_times.txt" to be consistent with the style conventions used in the orbits module. Output format will be a list of times in "hyph_str" format:

            2009-01-01-01-07-16-800000
            2009-01-01-02-32-13-400000
            2009-01-01-02-35-40-400000
            2009-01-01-02-35-40-400000
            2009-01-01-02-35-40-400000

If the -range parameter was used, output would only be two lines with the first and the last time in the input vector.