NASA launched “2009 Mission Madness” setting favorite missions against each other.  The first round ends today. To vote for your favorite missions, go to:

http://mission-madness.nasa.gov/mm/bracket.html

HiRISE is on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), but MRO in its bracket is currently losing to LCROSS, which is some moon impactor mission that hasn’t even launched yet!  Ridiculous!

You can vote as many times as you want:

• Click on the mission
• Click on the blue arrow to move it into the next round
• Click the big basketball in the center to submit.

Also, you should vote for the Mars Exploration Rovers.  And all things Mars related. Oh, and Voyager 1 and 2.  Oh, and Cassini.

GO MRO!!!!

We crossed the ten thousand observation mark this week; that’s our total number of observations since arriving at Mars. Roughly 9800 observations are of Mars (of course). Then there’s Phobos, Deimos, Jupiter, and the Earth and Moon (hope you were smiling!).

Over 9400 of these observations have been released to the Planetary Data System as JP2 files (over 9000 of these have color). As of today, 365 observations have been received after the end of the last PDS delivery, and are in the queue for the next one.

A handful of observations have data gaps in critical portions of the raw files (namely, science channel headers), or other severe problems that prevent processing from proceeding. We’re working on improved tools and procedures to alleviate the large amount of manual work to process those images; there’s a very good chance that the usable data can ultimately be recovered and released.

The rest (243 to be exact) are ‘CAL’ or calibration observations, used to verify settings on HiRISE, or obtain data that helps us remove noise and other imaging artifacts in our automated processing. They’re normally taken while on the night side of Mars with ’stim’ lamps on to provide a known, fixed light source.

Take a look at the plot below, which shows the cumulative number of observations received (in salmon) and the cumulative number released (as RDR’s, in mauve) as a function of time.

• The big steps are PDS data releases. The first was six months after beginning the primary operations in November 2006.
• There’s a missing step around December of 2007. That’s because we released a large number of color images, getting caught up with our color processing in lieu of a standard EDR/RDR release.
• The horizontal steps are not completely horizontal. The slope is our rate of weekly featured image releases.
• As noted earlier, just about everything is released, the totals are converging, the lag is 365 observations, or about a month at our current rate.
• The totals are a little less than 10,000; that’s the difference made by the CAL observations and the handful that currently can’t be easily recovered.
• There’s a ‘hump’ of received observations in late 2008, that’s the high data rate period (when Earth and Mars were closest).
• There are a few flat steps where no observations are received. One is the month-long solar conjunction period centered on Nov-Dec 2008, the safe modes of February 2007 and February 2008, etc.

We’re doing about ten observations per day at the moment. During the high data rate period it was nearly double that.

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If you are anything like me, then you spent a lot of time with the planets as a kid.  Growing up in the 1980s was amazing because of the Voyager spacecrafts. I was always hunting for the latest images from Uranus and Neptune in the daily newspaper and in magazines, so I could cut them out and paste them into my scrapbook. At the same time I was impatient for another mission to Mars.

Back then it was common to hear that there were probably few if any planets around other stars, unlike in the movies. The limited evidence for the existence of exoplanets suggested to some scientists that planet-making was a difficult process, and that our home star was unique in all the galaxy.  Now we know this is not the case.  Exoplanets are everywhere! Although the detection technologies we use today are biased to huge Jupiter-sized or bigger exoplanets close to their parent stars, the rapid pace of exoplanetary discovery suggests that planetary formation is in fact widespread.  Detection technology is also improving so that we can start exploring other regions around stars. Might there be planets in habitable zones around other stars, the same zone around the Sun we find our own watery, pleasant, life-covered Earth?

Last Friday, the Kepler spacecraft was successfully launched to begin a multi-year mission to look for just those types of planets.  Kepler will observe thousands of stars, looking for extremely slight variations in brightness that may indicate transits, or events where planets move in front of their parent star from the spacecraft’s viewing perspective. The detector on board the spacecraft is so powerful that it could possibly detect Earth-like planets in Earth-like orbits around distant stars.

As an operations specialist on a Mars-related mission, I cannot say that I am “bored” with our solar system.  On the contrary, in a galaxy with trillions of planets, might not our own planets be like snowflakes, unique unto themselves? What I can say is that missions like Kepler keep expanding, and confirming, my interest in planetary science! Meanwhile, Mars keeps surprising us, suggesting that exoplanets will also be unique and complex targets for further exploration. Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? In planetary science, the answer is a resounding “No!” Best success to Kepler and its team!

Image credit: Kepler Mission website – “Target Region in Milky Way (2)“

Using the HiRISE camera to take a special observation of a non-Mars target is a difficult but always interesting event for HiRISE Operations. While we have developed somewhat of a routine for regular imaging of the Martian surface, special observations require additional work that impacts our normal workflow as well as the science gathering of the other instruments onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Targeting specialists from Uplink already have so much work to do on a routine basis; adding in a special observation adds that much more work. Special observations are selected because they offer some scientific value that warrants the extra time, effort, and delay in routine science gathering.

We do not accept requests from the public directly regarding special observations.  Our very knowledgeable science team determines months in advance that the right geometry for a unique observation of a non-Mars target with scientific value is coming up. Over several iterations between Uplink and the science team, the target is planned in detail. For a target like Deimos, the smaller and more distant moon of Mars, the spacecraft needs to slew away from Mars to point the camera correctly. This is a dance that requires coordination between HiRISE, the other instruments (who will generally not be observing during this period), and the MRO platform.

For this opportunity,  we took two images of Deimos. The plan was to capture Deimos in the center of our CCD array so that the satellite would fall across our RED, BG, and IR color filters.  Uplink did a fantastic job with their targeting!  In the first observation – ESP_012065_9000 – Deimos lay across two channels of each color filter at the center of our array: RED4_0 and RED5_1, BG12_0 and BG13_1, and IR10_0 and IR11_1.  In the second observation – ESP_012068_9000 – Deimos was fully contained within RED5_1, BG13_1, and IR11_1. You can find more information about these observations here.

What did it take for Downlink to put these images together?  Well, Audrie and I came in on a Sunday (!) to wait for the observations.  Then I spent some time putting together preliminary images to send out to the team. During the following week I worked on registering the color filters to create the false color images.  See both images side by side here. Notice that green fringe around the first observation on the left? That is a bit of misregistration, something I could not seem to correct despite tweaking the position of the three color layers a pixel at a time. The first observation also required two separate stacks: (1) RED4_0, BG12_0, and IR10_0, and (2) RED5_1, BG13_1, and IR11_1.  After registering the two sides separately, I stitched them together using an ISIS tool called hiccdstitch.  That little notch you see at the top of the first observation is how the two sides almost but not quite line up. The two sides are slightly offset because their geometry is just slightly different.

Compared to the first observation, the second observation, confined to one channel each in the color filters, was wonderful to work with: no color balancing required, no stitching, and a relatively easy registration process!

GuyMac also helped make these Deimos observations a little easier to deal with than past special observations: he created a custom version of one of our processing pipelines that sharpens the image and brings out the colors a little bit. Once I had the observations registered, all I had to do was run them through his script for the really nice false color products you are now enjoying!

Last week, the MRO spacecraft unexpectedly “safed.” This is when it reboots and puts itself into a precautionary mode; in this case it was in response to an unexpected voltage reading (more information in this press release about the safing). The engineers at JPL and Lockheed Martin spent long hours investigating the cause, making sure the spacecraft is healthy and unharmed (which it does appear to be), and cautiously getting things back to normal. I’ll jump right to the happy ending of the story, which is that we are now back to normal, imaging Mars as usual (here’s the press release about resuming routine operations).

What do the people at the HiRISE Operations Center (HiROC) do when the MRO spacecraft safes?
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