Do you use the IAS Viewer to view our JPEG2000 (JP2) image files at full-resolution (which we highly recommend!)? If you use a Mac running OSX, you might be having trouble. Don’t worry, there’s a solution!

It appears that a recent Java patch causes problems launching the IAS Viewer client and other Java-based software launched via Java Web Start. The update changed the location of the Java Web Start application so that the system opens the downloaded JNLP file as a text file, most likely with something called Dashcode. One of our system administrators found a solution on an Apple support discussion archive. You should only have to do this once to fix the problem:

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Lately I’ve been helping out with the tours that we give of our operations center (HiROC) lobby and some public talks. Depending on the audience, we usually tell them a little bit about the HiRISE camera, its capabilities, and the MRO mission in general. We also talk about what we personally do at the operations center. The full-scale model of the camera and the “HiWall” are really nice exhibits for visitors. The highlight is usually when we show off what HiRISE has accomplished: color images, 3-D anaglyphs (everyone likes wearing those glasses!), and the recent addition of the fly-through movies has been very popular.

My favorite part is when people have questions for us - even when I don’t know the answers. Because, honestly, that’s what science is - we don’t always have the answers, but that’s what makes it exciting! It’s also fun to find out which aspects of the mission inspire other people, and I get a different perspective on what they think is interesting (versus just what I think is interesting!). Some of the questions are really good, too! We were talking with some middle-school students from El Paso, Texas, and their questions were so astute. One girl asked, “Does Mars have plate tectonics?” Another good question was, “How do we know about the interior of Mars?” These are great questions, and HiRISE is helping scientists to answer these and other questions, along with data from many other instruments studying Mars.

In case you were curious about these particular questions, like these kids were, here are some short answers and references for more information:
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Remember when I said we would start releasing data monthly to the PDS and public? We decided to work on improving calibration a little bit longer before we reprocess our data and start the monthly releases. Therefore, we are not going to have a June release (except for the usual weekly captioned image releases on Wednesdays), but we are getting closer to a regular monthly release! We are still ahead in our releases per PDS requirements, and we are preparing for the big reprocessing that is coming up. For example, our software pipelines have been updated to better automate reprocessing and we have hired two new student validators who will be responsible for visually inspecting all of the images as they are reprocessed. Training started this week.

Consider the May PDS release our practice run. Thank you for your patience…monthly releases of HiRISE images are indeed coming, but not quite as soon as we expected.

Planetary scientists used to keep new data from the spacecraft explorers of the solar system within the mission team for a lengthy period of time so they could make all the cool initial discoveries. Only later would the mission’s data sets be archived on the public Planetary Data System (PDS). Once archived, these data could then be used by the scientific community and public for further research and discovery.

Dr. Alfred McEwen, HiRISE principal investigator, decided early on that this incredibly powerful instrument should be “The People’s Camera”. This meant, among other things, that we would endeavor to make the data returned by HiRISE available to the scientific community and public as quickly as possible. We have PDS release requirements, but our goal has always been to beat those requirements. To do so, we needed to develop automated software pipelines to take the raw data and turn them into useful calibrated and geometrically mapped products. We also needed to develop the right PDS release tools, train a talented group of operations staff to validate the data and fix problems, and develop a website to effectively and beautifully showcase HiRISE images.

We now believe we have reached the point to be able to support a monthly release of recent HiRISE images to the public! This week we released the observations HiRISE took of Mars between orbits 11,600 and 12,599, or between January 16 and April 04, 2009. This makes us the first mission to release a data set to the PDS so quickly! Here are the statistics for this release, including the number of each product type released and their respective data volumes (EDRs are the individual uncalibrated image channels and RDRs are the calibrated, mosaicked, and geometrically-projected observations):

• 1,179 RDRs, 520 GB
• 16,861 EDRs, 459 GB
• 13,512 RDR Extras, 788 GB
• 33,152 EDR Extras, 7 GB
• 342 Anaglyphs, 51 GB

Totals for this release: 64,704 image products, 1.7 TB

This brings our total released product numbers and data volume to:

• 19,667 RDRs, 11 TB
• 278,807 EDRs, 9.5 TB
• 166,816 RDR Extras, 13.7 TB
• 529,095 EDR Extras, 0.1 TB
• 2,892 Anaglyphs, 0.5 TB

Total: 993,277 images, 34 TB

Those are various products for about 9998 Mars observations, and another reason why it makes no sense to hoard our data; there is too much of it and too few of us! The team scientists have plenty to do and there are plenty of discoveries to be made, old hypotheses to update, and new mysteries to solve.  The operations staff are now hard at work getting observations from orbits 12,600 through 12,999, or between April 04 and May 5, 2009, ready for the June PDS release. This involves making sure each observation has been processed by our software pipelines correctly, fixing any problems, and checking and double checking that the relevant image products are ready for release.  Sometimes we have to manually force an observation through the pipelines because some of its channels were lost during transmission to the Earth, or we might stumble across an observation we somehow forgot to send on to the color pipelines after it had been calibrated. There are spreadsheets to maintain, lists of problematic observations to keep (see the ERRATA.TXT file), and a variety of other tasks that need to be completed before the latest data set is ready for release.

Over the next few months we will see how this goes! It is a lot of work, but our desire for you to see these beautiful images of Mars as quickly as possible is strong. No promises, but we will also explore releasing completed observations even faster!

I was helping to prepare a presentation for a local high school, and I thought it would be cool to show them a picture of their school as HiRISE would see it. My first thought was the satellite layer in Google Maps. So I zoomed way in and took a screenshot. I wasn’t able to find a reference for the pixel scale of the satellite imagery (if anyone knows of one, please leave it in a comment!), so finally I just figured it out myself by using the Distance Measurement Tool. Turns out, if you zoom in as far as possible, the satellite images have almost exactly the same resolution as HiRISE! (This is true in Tucson, anyway; the coverage varies over different locations.) I thought this was a great way to visualize just how awesome HiRISE images are - just imagine looking at Mars like you can look at your home town on Google maps! …I guess that makes the rovers like Mars StreetView.

This is my neighborhood as HiRISE would see it: (Look at all those pools! Tucson is not nearly as dry as Mars )

New feature on the HiRISE website! HiFlyers made of released images like this one:

These are 11×17 PDFs showing cutouts of new releases, so you can print your own posters. Currently these are available for weekly releases starting 3/25/09 - look for more with each week’s new images!

They’re all available on this page. There are also links to the flyers on the individual image pages such as this one: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_011425_1775 (Look for the “HiFLYER” link in the lower right hand side.)

Enjoy!

NASA launched “2009 Mission Madness” setting favorite missions against each other.  The first round ends today. To vote for your favorite missions, go to:

http://mission-madness.nasa.gov/mm/bracket.html

HiRISE is on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), but MRO in its bracket is currently losing to LCROSS, which is some moon impactor mission that hasn’t even launched yet!  Ridiculous!

You can vote as many times as you want:

• Click on the mission
• Click on the blue arrow to move it into the next round
• Click the big basketball in the center to submit.

Also, you should vote for the Mars Exploration Rovers.  And all things Mars related. Oh, and Voyager 1 and 2.  Oh, and Cassini.

GO MRO!!!!

We crossed the ten thousand observation mark this week; that’s our total number of observations since arriving at Mars. Roughly 9800 observations are of Mars (of course). Then there’s Phobos, Deimos, Jupiter, and the Earth and Moon (hope you were smiling!).

Over 9400 of these observations have been released to the Planetary Data System as JP2 files (over 9000 of these have color). As of today, 365 observations have been received after the end of the last PDS delivery, and are in the queue for the next one.

A handful of observations have data gaps in critical portions of the raw files (namely, science channel headers), or other severe problems that prevent processing from proceeding. We’re working on improved tools and procedures to alleviate the large amount of manual work to process those images; there’s a very good chance that the usable data can ultimately be recovered and released.

The rest (243 to be exact) are ‘CAL’ or calibration observations, used to verify settings on HiRISE, or obtain data that helps us remove noise and other imaging artifacts in our automated processing. They’re normally taken while on the night side of Mars with ’stim’ lamps on to provide a known, fixed light source.

Take a look at the plot below, which shows the cumulative number of observations received (in salmon) and the cumulative number released (as RDR’s, in mauve) as a function of time.

• The big steps are PDS data releases. The first was six months after beginning the primary operations in November 2006.
• There’s a missing step around December of 2007. That’s because we released a large number of color images, getting caught up with our color processing in lieu of a standard EDR/RDR release.
• The horizontal steps are not completely horizontal. The slope is our rate of weekly featured image releases.
• As noted earlier, just about everything is released, the totals are converging, the lag is 365 observations, or about a month at our current rate.
• The totals are a little less than 10,000; that’s the difference made by the CAL observations and the handful that currently can’t be easily recovered.
• There’s a ‘hump’ of received observations in late 2008, that’s the high data rate period (when Earth and Mars were closest).
• There are a few flat steps where no observations are received. One is the month-long solar conjunction period centered on Nov-Dec 2008, the safe modes of February 2007 and February 2008, etc.

We’re doing about ten observations per day at the moment. During the high data rate period it was nearly double that.

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If you are anything like me, then you spent a lot of time with the planets as a kid.  Growing up in the 1980s was amazing because of the Voyager spacecrafts. I was always hunting for the latest images from Uranus and Neptune in the daily newspaper and in magazines, so I could cut them out and paste them into my scrapbook. At the same time I was impatient for another mission to Mars.

Back then it was common to hear that there were probably few if any planets around other stars, unlike in the movies. The limited evidence for the existence of exoplanets suggested to some scientists that planet-making was a difficult process, and that our home star was unique in all the galaxy.  Now we know this is not the case.  Exoplanets are everywhere! Although the detection technologies we use today are biased to huge Jupiter-sized or bigger exoplanets close to their parent stars, the rapid pace of exoplanetary discovery suggests that planetary formation is in fact widespread.  Detection technology is also improving so that we can start exploring other regions around stars. Might there be planets in habitable zones around other stars, the same zone around the Sun we find our own watery, pleasant, life-covered Earth?

Last Friday, the Kepler spacecraft was successfully launched to begin a multi-year mission to look for just those types of planets.  Kepler will observe thousands of stars, looking for extremely slight variations in brightness that may indicate transits, or events where planets move in front of their parent star from the spacecraft’s viewing perspective. The detector on board the spacecraft is so powerful that it could possibly detect Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits around distant stars.

As an operations specialist on a Mars-related mission, I cannot say that I am “bored” with our solar system.  On the contrary, in a galaxy with trillions of planets, might not our own planets be like snowflakes, unique unto themselves? What I can say is that missions like Kepler keep expanding, and confirming, my interest in planetary science! Meanwhile, Mars keeps surprising us, suggesting that exoplanets will also be unique and complex targets for further exploration. Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? In planetary science, the answer is a resounding “No!” Best success to Kepler and its team!

Image credit: Kepler Mission website - “Target Region in Milky Way (2)“

Using the HiRISE camera to take a special observation of a non-Mars target is a difficult but always interesting event for HiRISE Operations. While we have developed somewhat of a routine for regular imaging of the Martian surface, special observations require additional work that impacts our normal workflow as well as the science gathering of the other instruments onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Targeting specialists from Uplink already have so much work to do on a routine basis; adding in a special observation adds that much more work. Special observations are selected because they offer some scientific value that warrants the extra time, effort, and delay in routine science gathering.

We do not accept requests from the public directly regarding special observations.  Our very knowledgeable science team determines months in advance that the right geometry for a unique observation of a non-Mars target with scientific value is coming up. Over several iterations between Uplink and the science team, the target is planned in detail. For a target like Deimos, the smaller and more distant moon of Mars, the spacecraft needs to slew away from Mars to point the camera correctly. This is a dance that requires coordination between HiRISE, the other instruments (who will generally not be observing during this period), and the MRO platform.

For this opportunity,  we took two images of Deimos. The plan was to capture Deimos in the center of our CCD array so that the satellite would fall across our RED, BG, and IR color filters.  Uplink did a fantastic job with their targeting!  In the first observation - ESP_012065_9000 - Deimos lay across two channels of each color filter at the center of our array: RED4_0 and RED5_1, BG12_0 and BG13_1, and IR10_0 and IR11_1.  In the second observation - ESP_012068_9000 - Deimos was fully contained within RED5_1, BG13_1, and IR11_1. You can find more information about these observations here.

What did it take for Downlink to put these images together?  Well, Audrie and I came in on a Sunday (!) to wait for the observations.  Then I spent some time putting together preliminary images to send out to the team. During the following week I worked on registering the color filters to create the false color images.  See both images side by side here. Notice that green fringe around the first observation on the left? That is a bit of misregistration, something I could not seem to correct despite tweaking the position of the three color layers a pixel at a time. The first observation also required two separate stacks: (1) RED4_0, BG12_0, and IR10_0, and (2) RED5_1, BG13_1, and IR11_1.  After registering the two sides separately, I stitched them together using an ISIS tool called hiccdstitch.  That little notch you see at the top of the first observation is how the two sides almost but not quite line up. The two sides are slightly offset because their geometry is just slightly different.

Compared to the first observation, the second observation, confined to one channel each in the color filters, was wonderful to work with: no color balancing required, no stitching, and a relatively easy registration process!

GuyMac also helped make these Deimos observations a little easier to deal with than past special observations: he created a custom version of one of our processing pipelines that sharpens the image and brings out the colors a little bit. Once I had the observations registered, all I had to do was run them through his script for the really nice false color products you are now enjoying!