Tomorrow is the first launch opportunity for our sister mission, Phoenix. We don’t have a lot of day-to-day interaction with the Phoenix project, because their building is located a ways off-campus. It’s hard not to feel some camaraderie with them, though. Not only did HiRISE image a lot of possible landing sites, the mission is based right here in our department at the U of A.

If you aren’t super-excited about Phoenix yet, just try and not get excited by this awesome trailer they put together! (Alternate formats are available here, and on youtube, of course.) I was completely enthralled. It’s got everything — action, suspense, an emotional back-story, a totally Hollywood time-lapse mega-zoom to a night launch scene, and a rockin’ soundtrack!

The whole Phoenix website is fabulous, too, if you haven’t seen it yet.

Launches are risky times, and we’re all nervous and excited for Phoenix. All our best wishes go with it as it leaves this planet!

Mars is currently blanketed by a large dust storm. We first starting seeing it in late June. The MARCI instrument returns global daily mosaics of the planet, which we use like a weather report. These showed several dusty areas, and we had some hopes they would remain merely “regional.” However, in the following days, the storm activity increased, and winds blew the dust around the planet. Most of our images started coming back clouded over with dust. Some are just hazy, and some are completely obscured. Our Principal Investigator, Alfred McEwen, recently pointed out that this dust storm currently active in the Saharan desert on Earth looks very familiar!

At this point, the storm is considered a “hemispherical event,” meaning it’s mainly affecting “only” half of the planet (the southern hemisphere, in this case). We have our fingers crossed that this will not expand and become a global event like the 2001 dust storm.

(more…)

This past summer the IAU met in Prague to decide the fate of Pluto, and also to give names to several craters on Mars. After more than two years after I submitted the request, a fresh and rayed Martian crater now officially bears the name Gratteri. Gratteri is the birthplace of my Father, my Grandfather and their forefathers going back as far as back as any Tornabene can remember. Gratteri is a small medieval town of only 1100 people, but once was a more heavily populated duchy that ruled the Madonie region from the coast to the mountain tops. Unbenownst to me at the time I submitted my suggestion to the IAU, was the etymology of the name. By a staggering coincidence, the name Gratteri is derived from the Greek word ‘krater‘ meaning a basin or bowl to mix wine and water (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krater), which in the English language has come to signify a quasi-circular pit formed by an explosion (volcanic or hypervelocity impact). I was floored to say the least! Not only did I come to study these features on Earth, Mars and other bodies as my lifelong passion, but it was also the name of the town of my ancestral origins!

Well, soon I will be in Italy for the MRO PSG in Rome and then for the Terrestrial Analogues meeting in Trento. After these two meetings, I will be taking three days off to go down to Sicily for a long overdue break. My parents await me in Gratteri, and it will be so nice to meet them there for my second visit. I am particularly excited as I will be bringing a HiRISE image of the Martian Gratteri crater to present to the Mayor and townsfolk. In addition to a poster print out of the HiRISE image taken during our first cycle, I will be bringing an annotated version that I made and would like to share with you here. I used Google Earth to find Gratteri and acquired the satellite image along with the proper scale so that I could superimpose it on the HiRISE image. Gratteri is the cluster of buildings on the right with the cutout being approximately 2.5 km in width. The Martian crater Gratteri is almost 7 km in diameter. I was once again reminded, and immediately humbled, by the shear scale of this crater that I claim to know so much about! I’m amazed how big this rather small Martian crater is in relation to our terrestrial stomping grounds.

Well, I best be off. I still have so much packing to do! Not to mention, I haven’t even finished my talk yet…

Ciao miei Amici! Ci vediamo dopo!

Have you SEEN the new website yet???

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/

If not, why are you reading this? Go look at it! It’s beautiful!

Besides the cool new look that shows off our beautiful images so nicely, the new website redesign also has some fun AND super-useful new features: a searchable catalog of released images, illustrated explanations of all of our science themes, HiRISE “To Go” for mobile devices, & more.

Spacecraft missions are complicated endeavors that result in a wealth of scientific and engineering data. Long after the mission has ended, these data can be extremely useful for later study and discovery. With so many missions over so many years, how can later generations find and make use of these data?

The solution for many NASA missions has been the development of the centralized Planetary Data System (PDS). The PDS is several things: a collection of websites, a search capability, an archive, a database, a learning tool, etc. The PDS Imaging Node is located at http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/ and acts as “the curator of NASA’s primary digital image collections from past, present and future planetary missions.” These missions include Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, and many more. Now the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been added to the list, with the HiRISE team releasing our first several months of image data.

• MRO PDS page: http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/Missions/MRO_mission.html
• MRO Product Search page: http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/search/index.jsp
• HiRISE Volume: http://hirise-pds.lpl.arizona.edu/PDS/

What we have released is an archive of the HiRISE Experiment Data Records (EDRs) and Reduced Data Records (RDRs). EDRs are in the *.IMG file format and represent individual CCD channels (remember, there are 14 CCDs in the HiRISE camera and two channels per CCD, for a total of 28 channels). These EDRs are cleaned up, calibrated, stitched together, and mapped to Mars’ geometry, resulting in the RDR products. RDRs are in the *.JP2 and *.LBL formats. JPEG2000 is the technology that enables us to offer our gigantic images to the scientific community and the public in a timely and efficient manner. An observation’s image data are in the *.JP2 file and its meta data are in the detached *.LBL files. To view these products, JPEG2000 compatible software is required (see our site for a list of offerings).

While we have been trying to release up to five captioned images a week for the past few months, the PDS release represents several hundred images, most of them without captions. You can find them using the PDS search capabilities, and you can also find them on the new HiRISE site, unveiled today to coincide with this first PDS release. The redesigned site focuses on the images while providing, hopefully, a more user-friendly interface:

• HiRISE Site: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/
• “About Our Redesign”: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/profil.php
• Images released to the PDS: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/pds_release.php

As word gets out about the new site and the PDS release, you may experience some site slowness. Please be patient, and thank you for your interest!

Someone from the MRO project at JPL let us know about this upcoming documentary:

Starting next week, the Science Channel will begin airing an updated
version of the MRO documentary that it showed last year!

The first of six listed air times is 10 p.m. on Wednesday, May 9, but
I think it depends on your cable provider whether you need to do a
time-zone adjustment, so check your cable listings.

A full list of air times is at
http://science.discovery.com

On Thursday, April 19, 2007 I presented “HiRISE: The People’s Camera” at the Prescott Public Library in Prescott, Arizona. The library and the Prescott Astronomy Club put together a wonderful sequence of talks and star parties as part of International Astronomy Week.

My presentation went well. For some reason I was especially nervous right before the talk, but immediately after I started my nervousness went away, most likely because my hosts and the audience were so receptive. I am not sure how many people attended, but the room was full. At the end of the presentation there were a lot of great questions from the audience, including basic questions about Mars, questions about our current understanding of Mars, questions about HiRISE and its capabilities, and questions about the future of space exploration. I put my foot in my mouth only once, when I referred to the Deep Space Network (DSN) as “antiquated”. A former JPL engineer in the audience politely and informatively corrected my word choice.

A couple weeks before the talk we snail mailed two color printouts of PSP_001336_1560 – “Delta in Eberswalde” – to Prescott for framing. One image is the entire black-and-white image with central color swath, and the other is a zoomed-in color subscene. During setup prior to the presentation, the frame shop delivered the images, and they had done a fantastic framing job! People were naturally drawn to the images before and after the presentation and I answered lots of questions about them.

I promised I would place the PowerPoint presentation online, and here it is. The PowerPoint presentation file is about 22 MB in size. I have notes in the notes section of the slides, including information about the images used as well as their URLs. I want to especially thank Stuart Heggie for allowing me to use his beautiful astrophotography image “Conjunction of Moon, Venus and Mars – Dec 1 2002“. His image helped me to make a point about the history of Mars observation.

Thank you to my hosts, including Meghan and Douglas, and everyone who attend a delicious pre-presentation pizza dinner, including the current and former presidents of the Prescott Astronomy Club and their spouses, the library’s Adult Services Director, and the talented graphic designer of many of their brochures and other materials (including a t-shirt I will take a picture of soon). The audience deserves my thanks because they had such great questions and were incredibly good-natured. Thank you, everyone!

(I originally posted this on another blog on Wednesday, April 11. It is also appropriate here.)

Once upon a time Richard Hoagland was my role model and Carl Sagan was not. While Sagan was a media hog, Hoagland fought the good fight against the government conspiracy that hid evidence of alien intelligences and the artifacts left throughout the solar system by an ancient alien civilization.

There was, after all, the “Face”.

During college, I overdosed on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. I left pseudoscience behind. I saw Hoagland for the charlatan he really was (and is), and I came to appreciate Sagan for his reason, his passion, and his inspiring desire to educate.

Now, years later I work for HiRISE, participating in an experiment to photograph the surface of Mars using a high resolution camera. We had to take yet another image of the Cydonia region on Mars, because of the history, because of the public interest, because of the desire to leave silliness behind and instead embrace the wonder of reality.

Today the image was released (see the various image options, including the highest resolution JPEG2000 version), along with other gorgeous views of the Martian surface.

This then is the real face of Mars, a boulder-strewn mesa carved not by imaginary entities but by the slow yet steady erosion caused by winds, impacts, physical failure of rocks, and perhaps temperature variations.

I think that while I believed in the “Face” I could not have had the dream job I do today. I would not know the joy I know today, the joy that comes from seeing Mars not as I use to want it to be, but Mars as it really is. This is the real Mars, far more exciting and full of wonder and mystery than Hoagland’s fantasy version.

If a dedication means anything at all, then I dedicate this post to Carl Sagan, a person I did not appreciate while he was alive, but who has taught me so much through the legacy of his words. I now look at Mars with “skeptical thinking and an aptitude for wonder,” the two skills he highlighted in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.

Just as a follow up to the previous posts, here’s a picture of our Department Head, modified to appear to be taken from HiRISE, put on the HiWall for an April Fool’s Joke. This image has been shrunk, but otherwise is the same as the image that appeared on the HiWall.

On Monday morning, I started up HiPlan, our image planning and targeting tool (see this post for more about HiPlan), and this unexpected window popped up:

My first pre-coffee reaction was to panic, but then I read it more closely and realized what day it was. Turns out the HiCommander had snuck some “special” updates into a recent release of HiPlan.

The HiWall was also displaying a certain department head’s “face on Mars” all day.