Mars Terrain that Tantalizes Explorers
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.
September 23rd, 2008 at 6:36 am
Mmmm, every image for 10 sec. taking ~4 years? Using the 718000 number, that would amount to 83 days @ 10 sec per image. If we took the raw number of 8214 observations, that would be much much shorter. How did they get at the 10sec/~4 years number?
September 23rd, 2008 at 12:41 pm
The average HiRISE image is around 1000 full-res screenfulls at 1280×1024.
September 23rd, 2008 at 2:27 pm
He also might have been referring to all products, color, “nomap”, etc.
Just a quick calculation. We have processed ~ 8 Terapixels. An HD frame is 2 Megapixels. So that’s 4 million frames. If a frame was on screen for 10 seconds (or say a line scrolls from top to bottom in 10 seconds), it would take ~ 40 million seconds to watch it, or more than a year (a year is about 31 million seconds).