Mars Weather Stations
TerraPulse carries weather stations on two planets. Five landers have sat on the surface of Mars with barometers and thermometers, and their records are archived sol by sol (a sol is a Martian day, 39.5 minutes longer than ours): Viking 1 and Viking 2 from 1976, Curiosity, InSight, and Perseverance reporting from Jezero Crater right now. Each station is one slot — its site, its coordinates on Mars, and its measured record: the thin CO₂ air breathing in and out with the seasons (a quarter of the atmosphere freezes onto the winter pole every year — the barometers watch it leave), mornings near −100 °C, afternoon winds over the plains.
The dex
One slot = one fixed meteorological station on another world — the same family as our streamgauges and tide gauges, because a lander with a barometer is a fixed station; it just took a rocket to install. Slots link up to the Mars entry in the planetary atmospheres dex. Nothing about the design is Mars-only: when Dragonfly lands its met sensors on Titan in 2034, that's a new slot, not a new system.
Provenance
Everything comes from NASA's Planetary Data System (Atmospheres node) — the mission archives themselves: the Viking Lander meteorology volume, and Perseverance's MEDA instrument releases. The loaded series are per-sol summaries (mean, minimum, maximum) computed from the archived sensor samples — millions of one-per-second readings distilled to one honest row per Martian day per quantity, with the sample count kept.
What's in a slot
- The place — site name, Mars latitude and longitude, landing date, mission status
- Pressure — the full Viking record (Viking 1: 2,246 sols across six Earth years) and Perseverance's ongoing record
- Air temperature, wind — where the missions measured them cleanly
What you will not find: interpolated gap-fill. The Viking archive flags which bins were splined (interpolated) after sensor failures — those bins are excluded here, and when Viking 1's wind sensor broke on sol 45, its wind record ends on sol 45. Missing is missing.