Our image web pages all have this great map feature (click the image to the right for an example). (It’s been there for a while, so you may have noticed it already.) If you scroll down to the bottom, below the Observation Toolbox, you’ll see a mini context map from Google maps for the specific image whose page you’re viewing. It’s so useful to be able to see the HiRISE footprints placed on a broader view of Mars, showing the surrounding geology. Plus, you can pan and zoom around in the map. Way cool.
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Last week was the third landing site selection workshop for MSL, the Mars Science Laboratory. The workshop has been well covered in other blogs. If you’re unfamiliar with the seven sites up for consideration, the Martian Chronicles has posted excellent summaries of each site, starting with Miyamoto Crater and working through Gale Crater.

Most of the presentations from the workshop have also been posted here. It’s rare to see one without some HiRISE images!

Here at HiRISE, we are interested in this for several reasons - not only are some of our team members involved in the site selection, but HiRISE data have been integral to the process. HiRISE images have been used to study the small-scale geology of the sites, which is very powerful when combined with CRISM and other data sets to determine composition and mineralogy. HiRISE data has also provided calculations of the slopes and rock abundances around the landing sites, both of which are critical for the safety of the lander. We’ve been doing reconnaissance (the R in MRO!) of all of these sites since we started our primary mission! Here are some of the data we’ve produced for the MSL project.

• Lots of images! (links to a search for ‘MSL’ in our catalog; you can also search for the individual site names)
• Anaglyphs (red-blue 3-d of stereo pairs - these are so fun! )
• Digital Elevation Models (DEMs), which are painstakingly built from our stereo paired images. (This site doesn’t have any MSL DEMs posted yet, but they should be coming soon!)

I know people here have their favorites among these seven sites - what’s yours?

Here are a few excerpts from yesterday’s University of Arizona story about our PDS release:

The HiRISE team has so far released a total 26.9 terabytes of data…. That amounts to more data than has been released by all previous deep space missions combined.

“If I showed each HiRISE image for 10 seconds, it would take me about 4 years to show them all,” said UA’s Alfred McEwen, HiRISE principal investigator.

…

Spacecraft motion pushes this electronic array so that it records the view down to Mars’ surface at a ground speed of about 3.2 kilometers per second, or about 7,000 miles per hour.

Skeptics doubted that a technique called “time integration delay,” needed to compensate for extremely short exposure times – about one ten-thousandth of a second per pixel – could produce sharp, unsmeared images.

But the technique has worked “wonderfully well,” thanks to accurate spacecraft pointing and stability and precise exposure time calculations, McEwen said.

Click here for full story.

We’ve just released 1008 new HiRISE images to the PDS! (See main page, or click here for the catalog.) This release covers orbits 8200 - 9299 of the primary mission, or in other words, the end of April through the end of July. That means we’re releasing data that’s only about 6 weeks old! This is awesome - I’m so impressed with the downlink team! The amount of work required to process these images is astounding, let alone prepare and post everything for an official release.

Here are a few examples of cool images, which were previously unreleased:

• PSP_008248_2640, Polygons and spots on defrosting dunes (right)
• PSP_008269_1395, crazy weird stuff in Hellas Planitia (be sure to look at the whole browse image on this one!)
• PSP_008322_1865, Multiple generations of slope streaks on a crater in Arabia Terra (left)
• PSP_008343_1430, Gullies on mesas in Gorgonum Chaos

I’ve only looked through the first few pages in the release. I know there are a lot more amazing images in there, so if you’re browsing through the images, post some of your favorites below!

Yesterday was the 3-year anniversary of MRO’s launch. A number of people on our team sent MRO birthday wishes over email; here’s a blog card, too.

If spacecraft ages are like cat ages (and I don’t really know why they would be…), MRO is 28 in human years. That actually sounds about right to me - the mission has matured to the point where things are fairly routine (although there are always exceptions!), we’re past the difficult teenage-angst period, and we’re (hopefully!) wiser now about the way we do things, with many life lessons learned. But we’re not “over the hill” yet! In fact, we’re really in our prime right now.

In honor of this date, here’s a present - a video of the MRO launch: a smaller .ram version for Real Player (2 KB) or a larger .mov version for QuickTime (5.4 MB).

More interesting data from our web statistics: rankings of the most popular images on our website. Some you’d expect to get lots of hits: special campaigns like Phoenix lander hardware and Phobos, and of course old favorites like a certain feature in Cydonia. Others have made a splash in the news, like the avalanche caught in action and a deep pit that might be the entrance to a cave - whether their popularity on our website is a cause or effect of the media coverage.

I find it interesting to see which “regular” images, out of the thousands we’ve taken, caught people’s attention - in May, for example, gullies in a crater wall and ridges in Huo Hsing Vallis (left) were popular. June saw lots of hits on this beautiful image of the north polar layered deposits (above) and this image of delicate-looking, multi-tendriled slope streaks.

In July, the “Mystery Mounds” (PSP_008778_1685 and PSP_008548_2205) were popular, presumably because they are so “mysterious” - ? (By the way, these two areas, despite their similar titles, are nowhere near each other on Mars.) Lesson learned: We should give more of our images “sexy” titles.

Our awesome technical group sent me the link to a page that calculates an overwhelming number of different statistics for our website. Visitors are broken down by country (lots of Canadian fans!), where they go, how long they stay, what browsers they use…. For the most part, I think people come to the HiRISE website to look at our images - which is as it should be! However, I was astonished to see how many hits the HiBlog gets. We don’t get all that many comments (except for the record-breaking MPL search entry), so here I was, thinking we were in a little bubble of self-absorbed anonymity, talking to ourselves….

My protective bubble burst when I saw the number of hits we got over the past few months:

• April: 36,200!
• May: 99,200!
• June: 44,500!
• July: 36,410! (as of this morning)

(The huge number of hits in May was probably due to the combination of the MPL search and the Phoenix imaging.)

…although this could just be 10 people who really love us, hitting “refresh” 4,000 times a month.

I don’t know how this compares to other websites, but I’m humbled and a little intimidated to find we have so many readers! I guess we should write more entries (and better ones!) We’re hoping to recruit some more team members to post, too. Ideas or requests for blog entry topics are welcome! Leave us a comment below.

Our latest release includes more products from the original Phoenix descent observation, which include the color CCDs hand-mosaicked over the red filter CCDs. We’ve also been working with the Phoenix and MRO engineering teams to identify the location of the heat shield in the image (left). It’s pretty incredible that we caught the lander just after releasing the heat shield - a few more seconds, and it would have been out of the scene.

Emily Lakdawalla continues her excellent blog coverage in this article, which does a great job of explaining some of the reasons why this image was especially difficult to take. Along the way, she includes a tutorial on TDI (Time-Delay-Integration), written by one of the engineers that helped build the instrument. TDI is the method HiRISE uses to gather lots of light into its CCDs, and it’s one of the reasons we get such high signal-to-noise in our images. It’s a complicated concept, but it’s an important one for understanding HiRISE’s incredible imaging abilities, as well as its limitations.

From her blog post:

This is a fascinating story showing how necessary it sometimes is to have a deep understanding of an instrument in order to understand the data that comes from it. …It can be dangerous to read too much into space images until you have studied how the cameras really work.

It’s a great post - she deserves a cookie!

Hey, I’ll bet you didn’t notice, but the IAS Viewer has been upgraded to version 3.1.2.

One important feature enhancement is that the auto-stretch preference is now “sticky.” You can disable auto-stretch once and for all, as indicated in the screenshots below.

With this change, you can load our images and see them in the original stretch, while still having the ability to re-stretch within higher-resolution areas.

Despite being several years into our mission, we’re still seeing fresh faces on the HiRISE team. Recently we’ve added some new hires: student validators, researchers, and Targeting Specialists (with whom I work the most). We also continue to involve new scientists in operations - Participating Scientists or post-docs who haven’t gone through the planning process before. They come to HiROC to train during their first cycle, so we have a conveyor belt of visiting scientists as well.

The first Monday in June when they all started was krazy - lots of new people wandering around, office chaos and computer confusion…. By now they’re settling in and things are cooling down somewhat, although at least for the Targeting Specialists, we consider it about a 6-month process to get fully up to speed. In the first few weeks, their eyes are usually glazed over with information overload. At this point, they probably feel like they’ve been dropped in the hot oil of confusion (it’s also 106F in Tucson, which doesn’t help), then dipped in sticky, overly detailed procedures. Sweet procedures….

While we go through this training, the new kids are keeping us veterans on our toes - I keep finding places where the procedures we told them to follow are unclear, there’s a hole in the middle where steps are missing, outdated, or just plain wrong! So it’s really a shared learning experience. Besides, it’s always good to have some fresh, hot ideas and different perspectives to keep us from getting jaded. or dangerously skinny.

I’m excited for them - the sugary thrill when their first commands execute on the spacecraft, the pride when their first beautiful images come down, the feeling of fullness and mastery when they finally become fluent in the foreign language of acronyms…. Other firsts I’m sure they’re not looking forward to are their first mistake, their first late night, their first bad image…. So not everything is warm with honeyed nostalgia.

I’m sure they’ll all do a wonderful job, though, and be valuable additions to the team. In the meantime, though, I could really use some donuts…. Welcome, newbies!