DPS 2008 Meeting
I had the opportunity to attend the 40th annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. It’s being held here in Ithaca, NY at Cornell University. Along with some beautiful fall weather, I’ve also enjoyed some fantastic science. The meeting started with the Mars sessions on the first day. I think every single talk about the planet’s surface used HiRISE data! 
An entire session was devoted to the Martian atmosphere, which was interesting because I’m not as familiar with that. It’s also been great to see what’s going on in the rest of the solar system – I’ve been pretty Mars-oriented since starting with HiRISE, so I’ve loved hearing about things like the lakes on Titan, progress in exoplanet studies, and changes in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.
As usual, other blogs are covering the meeting well (Planetary Society and the Martian Chronicles, for example). In addition, the sessions are all being web-streamed live (links to streaming video here; full program here). I think this afternoon’s special sessions are going to be really interesting, so I recommend watching them. I’m especially interested in the mission highlights from the rovers, Phoenix, MESSENGER, Cassini, and Kaguya. We’ve already seen some results from Kaguya and MESSENGER in the individual sessions – exciting stuff!
November 4th, 2008 at 7:10 am
That’s pretty awesome!
November 12th, 2008 at 8:18 am
I don’t know any direct lines of communications to do this, so I will try here :
Do you have any plans to observe the relatively close approach by the Asteroid Bamberga to Mars next year ?
324 Bamberga will come to within 0.4 AU of Mars in late July 2009
From July 15-30 the asteroid is under 0.5 AU from Mars and will be about 6.66 Magnitude – a human on Mars
with very good eyesight could maybe see it with the naked eye.
As the asteroid is ~ 230 Km across, with 1 microradian resolution it would subtend about 4 pixels.
You could, among other things, search for satellites and color variations – even 16 pixels is better than none.
November 17th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Hi Marshall,
Thanks for your interest in HiRISE. Off-Mars viewing is very difficult and expensive. We’ve written some blog posts about the handful of off-planet observations we’ve done; hopefully those give you some idea of the complexity of that kind of special operations.
Unfortunately, that means we can’t honor special requests from the public or scientific community. There are many other space and ground-based telescopes that might have the opportunity to view this asteroid, though, perhaps even with a higher resolution than 4 pixels across.
November 18th, 2008 at 7:32 am
I was there as well and it was great
November 19th, 2008 at 12:02 am
There are many other space and ground-based telescopes that might have the opportunity to view this asteroid, though, perhaps even with a higher resolution than 4 pixels across.
Not, alas, until September 2013. Thanks for the consideration, though.