Many of you have sent us great feedback about the hundreds of cool anaglyphs we just released. And they are fascinating to see! Several people have asked the next reasonable question, “Where are the DEMs?” A DEM, if you don’t already know, is a digital elevation model. This is a product that can also be produced from a HiRISE stereo pair. HiRISE DEMs are awesome because they can model the terrain at a resolution of 1 meter per post! That means for every square meter of Mars visible in a HiRISE image (for which we have stereo) we can derive an elevation value. This provides the opportunities to measure geological features, model hydrology and spacecraft traverses.

We would love to be able to release a DEM for every HiRISE stereo pair, but alas, they don’t exist yet! We here at HiROC and a few other groups have made some DEMs, but only a small percentage of all the acquired stereo has  been processed so far. Why?? Because creating a DEM is actually quite difficult, and requires specialized software and a fair amount of time.

But there is hope! So far, the USGS Astrogeology group has created several DEMs in support of the MSL landing site selection workshops, the Phoenix lander and the MER mission. They are available on the USGS website. Here is an example of one of their products:

Columbia Hills DEM

Soon, we will begin preparing the DEMs we have made for release to the PDS Imaging Node. So stay tuned…

One of our blog readers asked about the wallpapers we post on our website for some of our released images. If you haven’t seen these, they’re linked over on the lower right of pages like this. Many different sizes are available, from 800×600 all the way up to 2560×1600 (for lucky people with ginormous monitors), so you can choose the right size for your screen resolution.

Our masterful web master creates these wallpapers for each of our weekly captioned releases (these are the images we release each week with some commentary written by the science team). He picks out an interesting area from each image and produces custom cutouts in different sizes. We provide these extra files because we think the images are so beautiful, everyone should have them on their desktop. Because they’re all done by hand, though, we unfortunately don’t have the resources to make these special products for every single image. For example, most of the 1,642 images we released in our big December PDS release don’t have wallpapers. However, you can make your own, and here’s how!
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The data rate from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) – in orbit around Mars on the other side of the Sun from our perspective here on the Earth – is set to increase soon, marking the end of solar conjunction and the beginning of MRO’s Extended Science Phase (ESP).  HiRISE will capture the first image of our next phase in Mars exploration this weekend.  Like all first images after the HiRISE camera has been idle for awhile, we will look especially closely for, but do not expect, any issues.

In these days leading up to the beginning of ESP the downlink team is checking our processing software and tools to make sure they are ready for the observation ID prefix change from PSP_XXXXXX_XXXX to ESP_XXXXXX_XXXX. The automated processing pipelines are ready to go.  My own validation and reporting Perl scripts make use of modules that are mission phase aware and pattern match file extensions instead of observation ID prefixes, so I think I am set. Any minor tools we miss can be easily updated as necessary.

With improvements to our tools and new procedures, we can sometimes recover image data previously stuck in the original raw data files. During this quiet period, I had an opportunity to go back to old observations, some from early in the Primary Science Phase (PSP), and recover errant channels that failed our processing software at the time.   This resulted in a few new channels of image data that we will include in a later reprocessing of our images.  For example, PSP_001746_1515 was originally processed without the RED1_0 channel. You can see this channel gap if you click on the observation’s “Full image (grayscale, non-map projected)” link.  An improved mosaic will include most of RED1_0, albeit with a small image data gap near one end.  Why did we not create this channel before?  Sometimes a data gap occurs between channels, obliterating the second channel’s science header.  The software at Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s RSDS that splits our image data into separate raw data channel files cannot figure out where to split the image data correctly within this gap and so image data from two or more channels are trapped in one raw data file.  When this jumbo raw data file hits our EDRgen processing pipeline here in Tucson, Arizona, the tool called HiRISE_Observation became confused when it discovered image data from another channel near the end of the file, and the error it flags halts the EDRgen processing pipeline.

We now have improved tools and procedures for dealing with this problem.  By running HiRISE_Observation outside of the EDRgen pipeline, it will successfully produce an EDR for the first channel before it complains about the second channel’s image data.  While we would love to get at that second (or third, or later!) channel’s image data, right now we recoverthe data that is easiest to reach.  Someday, we might have a tool that will recognize a missing science channel header, reconstruct this header, and then fit the header in correctly between the first channel and the additional channels stuck in one raw data file.

When will you see the new PSP_001746_1515 products, newly improved with the recovered RED1_0 channel?  Hopefully in a few months.  While I have recovered this EDR (as well as EDRs from other observations), we would like to wait to reprocess the entire observation until we have even better image calibration built into our processing pipelines.  It makes little sense for me to reprocess this observation now when we are just going to be reprocessing it again sometime early next year. Once all of our improvements are in place in the upgraded processing pipelines, we will reprocess ALL of our observations, a huge undertaking.

Next week we will be back to our normal downlink activities: making sure the processing pipelines behave, validating new observations, providing daily reports to the rest of the team, and processing color and RDR mosaics.  We will also add in routine creation and validation of anaglyphs and preparation for our next Planetary Data System (PDS) release in March.  The quiet time during solar conjuction was nice, but we are anxious to see new images from Mars!

After the long process of creating the HiGlyph Pipeline (anaglyphs producing software), processing the images through this pipeline and having them all properly validated, we here at HiRISE are proud to present you with a whole mess of anaglyphs (362 of them, to be exact )!

And now, for all of those curious minds out there, a brief overview of the HiGlyph Pipeline:

• Anaglyphs are created in a three-step process. The first step is to take the two images of the stereo pair and map project them. This helps the pipeline determine which image will be the left image and which will be the right image in the anaglyph.

• The second step takes the two images and looks to see if there are any improvements that can be done on them before putting them together. If there are not, the images move on. Often, due to the difference in viewing angle, the two images do not have a 100% overlap. Thus, to make the image a bit neater and easier to see, we trim off the excess portion of the image (the parts that do not overlap) and then assemble them so the left image is the red and the right image is the blue/green.

• The third and final step of this image processing is simply to prepare the images you see here and to update our catalog.

Seems complicated, right? Well luckily we have wonderful programmers that create these intricate programs. All I have to do is create a list of these images and run them through this pipeline. What really makes my job interesting is the validation process!

I have had the pleasure of being able to look at all 362 of the anaglyphs we have released today. But, you might ask, aside from looking super cool in 3-D glasses , what does it take to validate these anaglyphs? Well, at the beginning of this process the student validators and I got to ask that very same question. Since HiRISE has never had software to create images like this before, we played lab rat and came up with an entirely new technique for validation.

• You may notice that when not wearing the 3-D glasses there is a bit of a horizontal shift in the anaglyph. This shift is good because it is what allows us to see the image in 3-D. But, since the map projection of this process is not always spot on, we sometimes wind up with a vertical shift too. This is bad! Since most of us do not have googly eyes, this makes the image very difficult to see. With our validation process, we have to spot this out and fix it so that you do not have to strain your eyes (well… not too much at least ) in order to see the anaglyph.

Well, with that said, I leave you to your regularly scheduled HiRISE browsing! Enjoy!

HiRISE is (finally!) on Twitter! (Now that we’re getting a break during Solar Conjunction, we have time to catch up with trends in technology. )

If you’re not familiar with it, Twitter is kind of like a mini-blog. Posts are limited to 140 characters, which keeps things short & simple. In a way, it’s like updating your “status” in chat or on Facebook. You can use it many different ways – commands work via SMS text messaging, so you can get or make updates with a cell phone or other mobile device; it can hook into instant messaging, chat programs or social networking sites; there are widgets you can download, or simply make & read updates through the website.

To see a great example of how this can work, check out the Phoenix Twitter feed – that was a lot of fun, and also provided timely, award-winning coverage. We don’t aim quite that high, but we hope to give you a heads up about releases, important events, and maybe some random things just for fun. (Suggestions for tweets? Add them in a comment below!)

So follow HIRISE on Twitter to see what we’re doing now!

We’re going to release a bunch of anaglyphs next week! The ones I’ve seen are really cool. Personally, I have to work a little on focusing my eyes to make them look right (maybe I need new glasses!), but it’s totally worth it. The landscape pops right out of the screen, showing intricate textures in so much detail it’s almost tactile. Sometimes I want to reach out and touch my computer screen to feel the depths of valleys, individual boulders, and folds in the layering.

Here’s the teaser, including a link to where to get your own 3-D glasses. Here’s another blog entry explaining how we take the stereo images that are used to create the anaglyphs: Hi-Fi Stereo (the other kind) The new anaglyphs we’re releasing will be processed differently (I’m not sure of the details, but hopefully we’ll get someone who better understands the processing to explain it). Instead of the magenta tint of the previous analgyphs we had made by hand (like this example to the left), they will just be regular gray-scale, which I think is less distracting.