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Installation

Last edited by Dario Barghini

The PRISMA pipeline is written in the programming language IDL - Interactive Data Language v8.8, distributed by NV5 Geospatial Solutions. The code should be compatible with IDL v7 onwards.

IDL is a proprietary language and you need an IDL license to execute the pipeline. An open-source IDL compiler is available (GDL - GNU Data Language) but its full compatibility with the PRISMA pipeline is not granted.

The pipeline was developed on a Microsoft Windows 10/11 platform and is fully functional on Linux (tested on Ubuntu 18 server). To execute it on MacOS, some modifications may be needed (mostly for the graphical part).

This repository is made of two main parts: the code of the pipeline itself and the workspace for its execution.

Code

This folder contains the PRISMA pipeline code, i.e., its main procedures (calibration.pro and event.pro) and functions. It must be placed in a dedicated path from which IDL will autocompile procedures or functions when called the first time in an IDL session. This can be either:

  • the standard IDL path, where all IDL native libraries are found. On a Windows machine, this is usually: C:\Program Files\Harris\IDL88\lib. You will need administrator privilege to copy-paste in this directory. Be very careful when you are operating in this directory, since any modifications/deletion of native code may corrupt IDL and you will need to perform a new clean installation to solve the issue.

  • an user-defined IDL path. This is the recommended option. To do so, you have to add a new folder to the IDL path. Start an IDLde (Development Environment) session, then go to Window->Preferences->IDL->Paths. Click Add and browse for your directory. You now have to tick the new directory in the embedded list and click Apply. For the modification to be effective, close and restart the IDL session. This directory should contain only IDL code, and nothing else.

Workspace

The folder structure needed for the execution of the PRISMA pipeline and detailed in the Workspace page.

The complete workspace for the PRISMA pipeline is hosted in a separate repository named PRISMA-workspace, which is available to PRISMA collaborators only, since it hosts detailed information about the PRISMA stations, their location and configuration. If you do not have access to it, the workspace is easily reproducible following the guidelines detailed in the Workspace page.

If you have access to it, the PRISMA-workspace repository is linked to the pipeline via a git submodule in the workspace folder. When cloning directly from this repository, remember to include the --recurse-submodules option to automatically pull its content from the submodule.

Most of the directories contained in the workspace will be empty at the beginning since they will contain data (input) and results (output) of the pipeline itself.

Settings

After installing the code and recreating the workspace, some machine-dependent modifications are needed for the PRISMA pipeline to be fully operative on your computer. Most of them are enclosed in the configuration.ini file inside (your_path_to_the)/workspace/settings/. More details about this file are given in the Settings page. The configuration file in the workspace is designed for execution on the PRISMA servers. If you do not have access to the workspace, you can find a template here.

To make the pipeline working, you have to adjust a few fields in the configuration file. To do so, open it with a text editor and modify the following:

Path

This section contains the different paths to workspace folders and to specific files needed for the pipeline. Each entry must have the absolute path to its target on your machine; names and descriptions of entries should be self-explanatory and are however detailed in the Workspace page. A simple find/replace should get the job done.

In practice, you are not forced to put all directories of the workspace “physically” in the same directory, since the path section specifies the absolute path to each one of these. This is done to allow, for example, the raw data (captures and events) to be on separate disks with respect to the whole pipeline workspace, given the high amount of space required for their storage.

Triangulation/api_key

This is a API key used for the generation and download of static background maps needed for the triangulation map of events (see triangulation.pro). The API service is provided by Geoapify and it is based on OpenStreetMap tiles.

Go to the login page of Geoapify and generate your own API key. This service is free up to a usage limit of 3000 credits / day. The credit price for each map is: CP = 1 + (# tiles)/4. An average of 12 tiles is needed for each PRISMA map. Therefore you can generate ~750 maps / day.

Camera configuration

To make the code acknowledge the existence of a station, a few steps are needed:

  • add the station CODE (e.g., ITPI01) and NAME (e.g., PINOTORINESE) to the solutions.ini file inside workspace/settings/. If you do not have access to the workspace, you can find a template here.
  • create a folder named after the camera CODE inside /workspace/settings/configuration/. This folder must contain an initialization file in the format of CODE.ini, with the station and camera specification (e.g., ITPI01.ini). If you do not have access to the workspace, you can find a template here .

More details are given in the Settings page.

Third-part libraries

The PRISMA pipeline makes use of many external third-part IDL libraries in its code, listed here:

To install these libraries, follow the download links provided in the list and place the respective directories in an IDL path (see instructions above for the PRISMA pipeline).

NRLMSIS2.0 atmospheric model

The PRISMA pipeline uses the NRLMSIS 2.0 empirical model to define the state of the atmospheric (density and temperature) within the solution of the dynamic evolution of the meteoroid in the atmosphere (see the dynamic_model.pro page). NRLMSIS 2.0 is a major, reformulated upgrade of the previous version, NRLMSISE-00. To run this part of the code, you should build your own executable and place it (and other relevant files needed for the execution) in the directory /your_path_to_the/workspace/atmosphere/nrlmsis2.0. This executable has to be named msis20_windows.exe for a Microsoft Windows platform or msis20_linux.exe for a Linux platform (the version for MacOS is not yet implemented in the pipeline). Refer to the Atmosphere page for more details.

NOTE: The MSIS 2.0 license is extremely restrictive. The PRISMA pipeline only provides an IDL interface for the execution of the model. Users must respect the underlying MSIS 2.0 license.

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