Lately I’ve been helping out with the tours that we give of our operations center (HiROC) lobby and some public talks. Depending on the audience, we usually tell them a little bit about the HiRISE camera, its capabilities, and the MRO mission in general. We also talk about what we personally do at the operations center. The full-scale model of the camera and the “HiWall” are really nice exhibits for visitors. The highlight is usually when we show off what HiRISE has accomplished: color images, 3-D anaglyphs (everyone likes wearing those glasses!), and the recent addition of the fly-through movies has been very popular.

My favorite part is when people have questions for us – even when I don’t know the answers. Because, honestly, that’s what science is – we don’t always have the answers, but that’s what makes it exciting! It’s also fun to find out which aspects of the mission inspire other people, and I get a different perspective on what they think is interesting (versus just what I think is interesting!). Some of the questions are really good, too! We were talking with some middle-school students from El Paso, Texas, and their questions were so astute. One girl asked, “Does Mars have plate tectonics?” Another good question was, “How do we know about the interior of Mars?” These are great questions, and HiRISE is helping scientists to answer these and other questions, along with data from many other instruments studying Mars.

In case you were curious about these particular questions, like these kids were, here are some short answers and references for more information:
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Remember when I said we would start releasing data monthly to the PDS and public? We decided to work on improving calibration a little bit longer before we reprocess our data and start the monthly releases. Therefore, we are not going to have a June release (except for the usual weekly captioned image releases on Wednesdays), but we are getting closer to a regular monthly release! We are still ahead in our releases per PDS requirements, and we are preparing for the big reprocessing that is coming up. For example, our software pipelines have been updated to better automate reprocessing and we have hired two new student validators who will be responsible for visually inspecting all of the images as they are reprocessed. Training started this week.

Consider the May PDS release our practice run. Thank you for your patience…monthly releases of HiRISE images are indeed coming, but not quite as soon as we expected.