In addition the excellent voice work of Arizona Public Media radio personality Robert Rappaport, we’re very excited to announce our newest voice, Tre Gibbs.

Mr. Gibbs is a professional voice over talent based out of California. He saw our earlier call for new voices, volunteered and more than met the challenge. This week’s captions are his first for HiRISE and we’re very glad and appreciative of his efforts. You can view his website here.

We also have a new Spanish voice over, La costa de las estrellas. ¡Gracias para el apoyo!

Of course, we are always looking for new voices so we can replace our computer-generated audio with some down-to-Earth humans. The more audio we have, the bigger the audience for those who are visually impaired. Contact hitranslate at uahirise dot org for more info.

We also thank our volunteers who have made recordings for us throughout: Nahum, Murilo, Ari, Roberto, and Ana Margarida.

And welcome to our team, Tre, Fernando Beltran and Estrella Castello!

When we do public presentations, one point we like to mention is how much technology has changed in the exploration of Mars. Our favorite example is the (in)famous feature in the Cydonia region, snapped by Viking in the 1970s and known to the world as “the Face.”

HiRISE has imaged this landform as well, and at much better resolution. But even now, with MRO’s electronics, it sometimes seems an iPhone is more powerful and sophisticated with what it can do! Planetary probes have technological obsolescence built in, but unlike a phone or a computer, you can’t (really) upgrade anything. It’s amazing so many of our probes have lasted as long as they have. (Voyagers, we’re looking at you!)

But what got us writing this post was having stumbled across an old “In Search Of…” episode about Mars. It’s worth a look (you can tell your boss it’s research. We did!) to see how much things have or haven’t changed in thinking about the Red Planet: http://youtu.be/gdMILD8XUoQ

We thought we would drop this blog entry about the latest Lunar and Planetary Science Conference for your reading pleasure with some ideas about the past Martian climate.

When giving public presentations, we often mention areas of Mars, like Nili Fossae where we have detected phyllosilicates, which is a $50 word for clay minerals, broadly speaking. Because we keep our presentations general, we often say, these places are where we want to send rovers to see if water was once there, as part of NASA’s grand “follow the water” theme.

But, what if these clays aren’t present here because of the presence of a body of water but perhaps under the surface where water could exist in liquid form? And if we say that Mars was wetter in the ancient past, does that necessarily mean it was warmer?

Check out the link above for some of the latest research ideas.

We at HiRISE extend our condolences to one of our HiTranslate volunteers, Aristides Skourtopoulos, whose father passed away unexpectedly.

While we respect Ari’s privacy during a difficult time, we are very proud of his help in just about single-handedly getting the Greek section of HiRISE underway. We’ve been fortunate to have such a terrific group of volunteers that they all really seem part of the HiRISE team.

Thank you, Ari! Your friends at HiRISE wish you and your family well.

We’ve been very lucky to have an actual radio personality, Robert Rappaport of Arizona Public Media, narrating our weekly imaged captions. And we’ve been especially lucky when some of our fantastic language volunteers have made their own recordings to accompany their texts as well.

But we’d like to see who else has talent. If you have a good voice and want to volunteer a bit of your time, we’re looking for folks to help us record our translated captions: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Greek. We often use a computer voice for narration and while it’s not bad, it’s not the same as a person. We make these audio clips mostly for the visually impaired, so your help will go to help everyone learn about Mars.

So if you’re interested in being Mars’ next recording star, contact us at hitranslate@uahirise.org for more info.

Everything is a teaching moment.

Really.

We’re lucky to get a lot of feedback through our website from the public. Lots of folks asking good questions, or need some clarification on something.

BUT THEN WE GET THE SCREAMERS.

Red flags go up, hackles raise, trepidation sets in. When we get feedback in email with something in all caps, we expect the worst: why are you hiding stuff? Why won’t NASA release (insert favorite pareidolia image here)?

One question that’s often hard to decipher is when we’re asked for the original image. A light red flag goes up: what do you mean? And why are you asking in all caps?

But, it’s the nature of the job: everything is a teaching moment. Everyone gets a respectful answer, or a kind request for a bit more information about what they mean. Most folks are satisfied and plunge right back into looking at our images of Mars. Every now and then, a person likes to start a…discussion based on some well-defined positions.

But every moment is a teaching moment, we say.

Looks like the HiBlog hasn’t gotten any love in some time, so we’re making a better effort to update it. We should probably start with overhauling how HiBlog look, but that will come soon.

In the meantime, we have a new batch of captioned images for your enjoyment: http://uahirise.org/nea.php

Since its launch in 2010, HiWish has been quite successful. We’ve captured images of Mars for well over 500 public suggestions, an average of about one per day. Updates to the HiWish web application were made in the summer of 2011, and they include the following:

• the interactive maps of Mars now expand to fill most of the available page size instead of using a fixed, small size
• there is an additional basemap option: Night-time Infrared. Also, the Day-time Infrared basemap is higher resolution. These maps are made from THEMIS data by NASA’s Ames Research Center and we appreciate the work done by those teams
• markers for CRISM data can now be drawn on the suggestion maps, and they link to the corresponding publicly available download
• you can stretch (or shrink) your suggestion’s rectangle to match the longest (or shortest) observation length that HiRISE typically takes. It still defaults to our average image length. After placing a suggestion, click on the marker and you’ll be able to resize it to match a particular feature’s length.
• there is now a “browse” map where you can just explore, without creating a suggestion
• global maps of HiRISE Digital Terrain Models and of HiWish observations to date

Thanks for using HiWish, and keep the suggestions coming!

Howdy, readers. About every two years, the orbits of Mars and Earth work to put Mars behind the Sun when viewed from Earth. In this arrangement, the Sun makes it pretty tough to communicate with the various spacecraft we’ve got orbiting the Red Planet and creeping around on its surface. This arrangement, called “solar conjunction,” lasts for about five weeks. During this time, we generally reduce operations to the bare minimum required to keep these marvels running. MRO’s HiRISE is no exception, do we haven’t been taking images for the past five weeks.

That ends today, though. Mars recently came out of solar conjunction and operations have been ramping up. We ought to be starting our first post-conjunction image at around 9 PM Tucson time (MST) tonight, February 22.

I mention this fact to draw your attention to a pretty cool feature of the Google Earth desktop application. It’s been around for a while, but you might not have heard about it. It’s called Live from Mars, and it shows you the orbits of MRO and Odyssey as they’re orbiting Mars right now. You can also see the image footprints for upcoming HiRISE (MRO) and THEMIS (Odyssey) observations. Even cooler, you can virtually ride along with MRO or Odyssey, your point of view tracking along those orbits.

To set it up, launch the latest version of the Google Earth desktop application. Find the little menu button that looks like Saturn, and click it to drop down the menu. Select Mars.

Once Mars comes into view, go to the Layers panel and open up the Mars Gallery group. You should see Live from Mars. Open up that group, and you’ll see Live from Odyssey and Live from MRO. Open up the Live from MRO group and you’ll find MRO Orbit, Fly Along, and HiRISE Footprints. Activate those and you’ll see a segment of the MRO orbit; you might see a HiRISE footprint or two, but our images are so small compared to the size of Mars that you might need to zoom in a bit to find them.

If you double-click the Fly Along item, your point of view will switch to that of MRO orbiting Mars. As you travel along, you’ll come across upcoming HiRISE observations, such as the one called out in the above image.

Cool, isn’t it?

Our cycle of twittering (”HiTwycle“) is now over – the last image is on the ground, validated, processed, and will soon be released. (We release data in 100-orbit increments, which don’t necessarily fall along cycle boundaries, so the first half of cycle 89 will be released in May and the second half in June.)

It was fun to share some of the behind-the-scenes details with our followers! I thought it was pretty funny when Nick or I were too lazy to walk over to each others’ offices to ask a question, and asked each other over twitter instead. ha! I guess those questions probably give you a feel for the nitty-gritty of planning a cycle, anyway. I hope it was interesting! If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments.

If you missed it and want to read through the saga, I made an archive of tweets with the #hitwycle hashtag. (I didn’t start this until part-way through, though, so unfortunately the first few days of tweets are missing. Soon you can check the Library of Congress for them! ) You can see the whole archive here:

http://www.twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/hitwycle

Some of my favorites are below.
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