Sorry we haven’t been posting much lately!

To tell the truth, some of us are experiencing a little bit of a lull. We’re in conjunction right now — this means that the Sun is directly between Earth and Mars, so we can’t communicate with the spacecraft. (Here’s a link with a few diagrams to illustrate this.)

The HiRISE instrument is turned off, and we’re not taking any images. However, there are other activities going on at HiROC….

We start imaging again on November 8, and a few of us are already planning for that. PSP, the Primary Science Phase, is divided into two-week cycles. The first cycle is rm001, the second rm002, etc. Each cycle has a Targeting Specialist assigned to it (this one isn’t me, or I wouldn’t have time to write this!). The Targeting Specialist works with a member of the science team, the “Co-Investigator of the Pay Period,” (”pay period” because of the two-week cycle) or CIPP. The CIPP helps to choose scientifically important targets, and the Targeting Specialist does the scheduling and commanding. They work together on coordinating with other teams, choosing camera parameters, etc. There are a lot of details that need to be worked out!

We’re also building commands for a few special calibrations that will occur during the first cycle. On November 9th, we’re going to take a series of flat field images for calibration purposes. For these, the spacecraft will yaw (rotate around the normal axis) 90 degrees. Then when we take an image, it will smear across the whole field of view, giving us as close as we can get to a uniformly bright image. Once we average this over a lot of observations, we will divide our images of Mars by this as one of the calibration processing steps.

We will also be participating in a Deimos observation on November 13th. The calibration is actually set up for CRISM, and we’re just riding along, so the viewing conditions are not ideal for HiRISE. So don’t expect a fantastic HiRISE observation of Deimos! Instead, we’re taking this opportunity to measure stray light. Stray light is the extra scattered light that gets into the camera’s optics. We’re pretty confident that not much stray light gets into the excellent optics of the HiRISE camera, but we want to make sure.

Of course, the work never really stops, so we’re all busy with other things, as well — updating procedures and software, training new people, and trying to get ourselves organized and prepared. We want to be ready for the onslaught of images that will start in a few weeks and continue for (at least) the next two years!

NASA story: During Solar Conjunction, Mars Spacecraft Will Be on Autopilot