• Requests for Comment
• FAQ
• Installation
• Start Contributing
• ISIS Data Area
• Installing Older Versions of ISIS

The ISIS project uses a Request for Comment (RFC) model whereby major potential changes to the code base, data area, or binary delivery process are proposed, iterated on by any interested parties, and potentially adopted. Right now, RFCs are being housed in this repository's wiki with associated discussions occurring on astrodiscuss.

Current open RFCs:

• Migration of ISIS Data to Git
• Removal of LOLAGRAIL SPKs from the data area

We encourage all contributors and users to review open RFCs and comment as these proposed changes will impact use of the software.

We maintain a list of frequently encountered questions and issues. Before opening a new issue, please take a look at the FAQ.

This installation guide is for ISIS users interested in installing ISIS (3.6.0)+ through conda.

1. Download either the Anaconda or Miniconda installation script for your OS platform. Anaconda is a much larger distribtion of packages supporting scientific python, while Miniconda is a minimal installation and not as large: Anaconda installer, Miniconda installer

2. If you are running on some variant of Linux, open a terminal window in the directory where you downloaded the script, and run the following commands. In this example, we chose to do a full install of Anaconda, and our OS is Linux-based. Your file name may be different depending on your environment.

   chmod +x Anaconda3-5.2.0-Linux-x86_64.sh
   ./Anaconda3-5.2.0-Linux-x86_64.sh
   

   This will start the Anaconda installer which will guide you through the installation process.

3. If you are running Mac OS X, a pkg file (which looks similar to Anaconda3-5.3.0-MacOSX-x86_64.pkg) will be downloaded. Double-click on the file to start the installation process.

4. After the installation has finished, open up a bash prompt in your terminal window.

5. Next setup your Anaconda environment for ISIS. In the bash prompt, run the following commands:

   #Create a new conda environment to install ISIS in
   conda create -n isis python=3.6
   
   #Activate the environment
   #Depending on your version of Anaconda use one of the following:
   
   #Anaconda 3.4 and up:
   conda activate isis
   
   #Prior to Anaconda 3.4:
   source activate isis
   
   #Add the following channels to the environment
   conda config --env --add channels conda-forge
   conda config --env --add channels usgs-astrogeology
   
   #Verify you have the correct channels:
   conda config --show channels
   
   #You should see:
   
   channels:
       - usgs-astrogeology
       - conda-forge
       - defaults
   
   #The order is important.  If conda-forge is before usgs-astrogeology, you will need to run:
   
   conda config --env --add channels usgs-astrogeology
   

6. The environment is now ready to download ISIS and its dependencies:

   conda install -c usgs-astrogeology isis
   

   If you would like to work with our latest ISIS version 3, rather than updating to ISIS 4, instead run:

   conda install -c usgs-astrogeology isis=3.10.0
   

7. Finally, setup the environment variables:

   #Execute the ISIS variable initialization script with default arguments.
   #This script prepares default values for:  $ISISROOT, $ISISDATA, $ISISTESTDATA
   
   python $CONDA_PREFIX/scripts/isisVarInit.py
   

   Executing this script with no arguments will result in $ISISDATA=$CONDA_PREFIX/data, and $ISISTESTDATA=$CONDA_PREFIX/testdata. The user can specify different directories for both of these optional values:

   python $CONDA_PREFIX/scripts/isisVarInit.py --data-dir=[path to data directory]  --test-dir=[path to test data directory]
   

   More information about the ISISDATA environment variable and the ISIS Data Area can be found here. Now everytime the isis environment is activated, $ISISROOT, $ISISDATA, and $ISISTESTDATA will be set to the values passed to isisVarInit.py. This does not happen retroactively, so re-activate the isis envionment with one of the following commands:

   for Anaconda 3.4 and up - conda activate isis
   prior to Anaconda 3.4 - source activate isis
   

If you don't use conda for anything else on your computer, you can skip this section.

If you use conda to install other packages, you may run into difficulties with adding the isis conda package to those environments or adding other conda packages to the isis environment you just created above. This is because the isis conda package pins a number of requirements that may clash with other packages.

At this time, we recommend creating the isis environment as detailed above, and then not adding any other conda packages to it. This is similar to the best practice usage of not adding any conda packages to your 'base' conda environment.

Instead, when you need to have a conda environment with other packages that also needs to be able to run ISIS programs, we have two different options. In both cases, we'll assume that you create a new environment called 'working' (but it could be named anything) that you want to add some conda packages to, but from which you also want ISIS access.

The first step is to create 'working' and add whatever conda packages you want.

1. conda activate isis

2. conda activate --stack working

That's it. Told you it was easy.

This activates the isis environment, gets it all set up, and then it 'stacks' the new working environment on top of it. To get out, you'll have to conda deactivate two times to get out of working and then out of isis.

The above stacking situation may have issues if you have a particularly complicated set of packages or other dependencies. The idea here is that the only thing you really need in your 'working' environment are the ISIS environment variables and the path to the ISIS executables.

If the above paragraph sounded like gibberish, please seek help from your system administrator or local computer guru.

And we can do this via customizations in the conda environment's activate.d/ and deactivate.d/ directories. Adding these things can also be done manually from the command line, but encoding them in the activate.d/ and deactivate.d/ scripts is handy.

1. Create your conda environment however you like, adding whatever packages you need. If you were reading the directions above, you've already done this.

2. Locate the path to your conda environments:

   conda activate
   echo $CONDA_PREFIX
   conda deactivate
   

   You'll probably get a directory that is in your home directory and is named anaconda3 or miniconda3 or something similar. For the rest of this set of instructions, we'll refer to it as $HOME/anaconda3 to represent a directory named anaconda3 in your home directory, but this should be whatever you get from the above echo command.

3. Locate the path to your ISIS conda environment:

   conda activate isis
   echo $CONDA_PREFIX
   conda deactivate
   

   This should probably be $HOME/anaconda3/envs/isis. You can see that it starts with whatever you got from step 1, and ends in the name of your isis environment, if you followed the installation instructions above, you called that environment 'isis'.

   You can do the same thing to find the path to your new 'working' environment, but in this example, it will be at $HOME/anaconda3/envs/working.

4. Copy the ISIS activation and deactivation scripts to your new environment. Please note that the directory names in the instructions below are based on how you installed conda and what you named the 'isis' environment and the 'working' environment. You may not be able to just copy and paste these instructions directly, they are an example. Likewise, if your shell doesn't take the bash syntax in the .sh files, then you may need to select one of the other env_vars.* files in the isis directories.

   cd $HOME/anaconda3/envs/
   mkdir -p working/etc/conda/activate.d/
   mkdir -p working/etc/conda/deactivate.d/
   cp isis/etc/conda/activate.d/env_vars.sh working/etc/conda/activate.d/env_vars.sh
   cp isis/etc/conda/deactivate.d/env_vars.sh working/etc/conda/deactivate.d/env_vars.sh
   

5. Edit the copied activation file in $HOME/anaconda3/envs/working/etc/conda/activate.d/ to add the ISIS executable directory to the path, by adding this line at the end:

   export PATH=$PATH:$ISISROOT/bin
   

   Or whatever is appropriate for your shell if you aren't using the .sh file. No matter how you do it, it is important that you add $ISISROOT/bin to the end of the current path in your working environment, and not at the beginning.

6. Edit the copied deactivation file in $HOME/anaconda3/envs/working/etc/conda/deactivate.d/ to remove the path, by adding this line at the end:

   export PATH=`echo -n $PATH | awk -v RS=: -v ORS=: '/isis/ {next} {print}' | sed 's/:$//'`;`
   

   Or whatever is appropriate for your shell if you aren't using the .sh file. If your ISIS environment is not called isis, then you need to replace that part in the awk line above. You can look in the activate.d/env_vars.sh file to see what it should be.

Adding the lines in steps 5 and 6 manually adds the 'bin/' directory of the ISIS environment to your path (step 5), and then manually removes it (step 6) on deactivation. If you are using some other shell, you may need to use a different syntax to add and remove these elements to and from your path.

To update to a new version of ISIS up to version 3.9.1, simply run conda update isis3

To update to our latest release candidate up to version 3.9.1, run conda update -c usgs-astrogeology -c usgs-astrogeology/label/RC isis3

Note that for ISIS versions 3.10 and above, new versions and release candidates will only be available under the package name isis and conda update isis3 and
conda update -c usgs-astrogeology -c usgs-astrogeology/label/RC isis3 will no longer work for additional updates. Instead, after installing an isis package, conda update isis should be used to update to a new version and conda update -c usgs-astrogeology/label/RC isis to update to a new release candidate.

ISIS runs on many UNIX variants. ISIS does not run natively on MS Windows, although it has been successfully run on Windows 10 using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Instructions for doing this can be found here. The UNIX variants ISIS has been successfully built on are:

• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
• Mac OS X 10.13.6 High Sierra
• Fedora 28
• CentOS 7.2

ISIS may be run on other Linux or macOS operating systems then those listed above, but it has not been tested and is not supported.

Here are the minimum hardware requirements

• 64-bit (x86) processors
• 2 GB RAM
• 2.5 GB of disk space for ISIS binaries
• 10 GB to 510 GB disk space for ISIS data
• 10 GB to many TB disk space for processing images
• A quality graphics card

To build and compile ISIS requires following the instructions listed below, which are given on the GitHub wiki page for the ISIS project:

• Getting Started With GitHub
• Building ISIS3 With cmake
• New ISIS3 environmental variables and their meanings
• Custom data and test directories
• Cleaning builds
• Building individual applications/objects
• Building ISIS3 documentation
• What to do if you encounter any problems

Many ISIS applications require ancillary data. For example, calibration applications require flat files to do flat field corrections, and map projection applications require DTMs to accurately compute intersections. Due to its size, this data is stored in a separate directory called the ISIS Data Area. Any location can be used for the ISIS Data Area, the software simply requires that the ISISDATA environment variable is set to its location.

Under the root directory of the ISIS Data Area pointed to by the ISISDATA environment variable are a variety of sub-directories. Each mission supported by ISIS has a sub-directory that contains mission specific processing data such as flat files and mission specific SPICE. There are also data areas used by more generic applications. These sub-directories contain everything from templates to test data.

If you plan to work with data from all missions, then the download will require about 520 GB for all the ancillary data. However, most of this volume is taken up by SPICE files. We have a Web service that can be used in lieu of downloading all of the SPICE files. This reduces the total download size to about 10 GB.

The ISIS Data Area is hosted on rsync servers and not through conda channels like the ISIS binaries. This requires using the rsync command from within a terminal window within your Unix distribution, or from within WSL if running Windows 10. Downloading all mission data requires over 520 GB of disk space. If you want to acquire only certain mission data click here. To download all ISIS data files, continue reading.

To download all ISIS data, enter the following commands in the location where you want to install the ISIS Data Area:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/ .

Note: The above command downloads all ISIS data including the required base data area and all of the optional mission data areas.

This data area contains data that is common between multiple missions such as DEMS and leap second kernels. As of ISIS 4.1, the base data area is no longer required to run many applications as data such as icons and templates has been moved into the binary distribution. If you plan to work with any applications that use camera models (e.g., cam2map, campt, qview), it is still recommended you download the base data area. To download the base data area run the following commands:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/base .

There are many missions supported by ISIS. If you are only working with a few missions then you can save disk space by downloading only those specific data areas. If you want to limit the download even further, read the next section about the SPICE Web Service. Otherwise jump to the mission specific sections.

ISIS can now use a service to retrieve the SPICE data for all instruments ISIS supports via the internet. To use this service instead of your local SPICE data, click the WEB check box in the spiceinit program GUI or type spiceinit web=yes at the command line. Using the ISIS SPICE Web Service will significantly reduce the size of the downloads from our data area. If you want to use this new service, without having to download all the SPICE data, add the following argument to the mission-specific rsync command:

--exclude='kernels'

For example:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --exclude='kernels' --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/cassini .

WARNING: Some instruments require mission data to be present for radiometric calibration, which is not supported by the SPICE Web Server, and some programs that are designed to run an image from ingestion through the mapping phase do not have an option to use the SPICE Web Service. For information specific to an instrument, see the documentation for radiometric calibration programs.

Apollo Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/apollo15 .
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/apollo16 .
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/apollo17 .

Cassini Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/cassini .

Chandrayaan Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/chandrayaan1 .

Clementine Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/clementine1 .

Dawn Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/dawn .

ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/tgo .

Galileo Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/galileo .

Hayabusa Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/hayabusa .
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/hayabusa2 .

Juno Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/juno .

Kaguya Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/kaguya .

Lunar Orbiter Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/lo .

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/lro .

Mars Exploration Rover Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/mer .

Mariner10 Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/mariner10 .

Messenger Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/messenger .

Mars Express Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/mex .

Mars Global Surveyor Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/mgs .

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/mro .

Mars Odyssey Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/odyssey .

Near Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/near .

New Horizons Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/newhorizons .

Rolo Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/rolo .

Rosetta Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/rosetta .

Smart1 Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/smart1 .

Viking Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/viking1 .
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/viking2 .

Voyager Mission:

cd $ISISDATA
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/voyager1 .
rsync -azv --delete --partial isisdist.astrogeology.usgs.gov::isisdata/data/voyager2 .

If you are looking for ISIS2, please refer to the ISIS 2 Installation Guide for instructions on downloading and installing ISIS 2.

If you are looking for a version of ISIS prior to 3.6.0, please refer to the Legacy ISIS3 Installation Guide for instructions on downloading and installing ISIS, versions prior to 3.6.0.