Pictures are worth 1,000… followers
I just realized our Twitter account has almost 1,000 followers! It’s crazy to think that our words and pictures are going out to that many people every day. 
Considering how many taxpayers fund this mission, though, a thousand people is only a tiny percentage.
We recently calculated the cost of building and running HiRISE since its inception, and it comes to ~70 million dollars over the last seven years. That sounds like a lot of money to me, but it works out to only 22 CENTS per American! What a bargain! I admit, I’m a little biased, but I think HiRISE’s amazing images, exciting science, and advances in exploration are well worth that investment. The return on that investment isn’t just a matter of the data we get back from Mars – that money goes toward employing engineers, scientists, students, and operations staffers like me. I counted almost 100 people on our team roster that are at least partially supported by HiRISE funds.
Ideally, we’d reach far more than 1,000 people – as “the people’s camera,” we’d love to give every person their 22 cents’ worth. Of course, not everyone uses Twitter, so we try to do other things, like this blog, our website, facebook, on-line learning & activities, and in-person tours and talks.
What else could we be doing? What kinds of things would you like to see us do more of? What’s worth 22 cents to you?
November 15th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Congrats on the 1000 followers, now go for 1000 more
December 7th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Folks
You are one of the gems of the internet. Beauty and wonder measureless to man. But if it really was costing 70 large per viewer you
would have to pull the plug to save your souls. And we don’t want that. Count hits, find an algorithm, get some other numbers before some space hating Senator stumbles on this.
December 9th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Hi Martin,
Thanks for your comments!
I think I was unclear, though – the 1,000 followers I mentioned are only those people that follow us on twitter. Many, many more people visit our website, download our data from the PDS, read our captioned images of the day, etc. In fact, this blog alone gets ~40,000 hits a month, last time I checked!
December 9th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
Kite
You were most likely clear enough for those not as obtuse as I. I dance the dance of relief to learn your numbers say you are sound. The only thing better than your wonderful photographs would be one showing dome roofs surrounded by crawler tracks.
You are one of the ones making that happen.
December 26th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Kite,
If I where you, I would try looking at someone that has a lot of influence on the imagination of the masses, and a soft spot for science and exploration (James Cameron). If this guy took a good interest in this program and gave it some of the exposure you guys deserve, I believe it would help all of the efforts to study Mars and beyond.
I just wish that our government would smile more on the hard work and dedication that you guys give to provide us with such spectacular science, rather than blowing all our money on the banks, and more bombs and guns to kill each other with…
This is the first time I’ve visited this website, and I must say I’m astounded by the quality and beauty of the images provided by HiRISE!
Keep up the great science!
-John
December 31st, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Hi, John,
It turns out that James Cameron is indeed interested in the Mars exploration program. He is a Mars Science Laboratory Mastcam co-investigator:
http://www.msss.com/msl/team.html
http://www.msss.com/press_releases/mslselection/index.html
I suspect we will see more from him regarding this kind of exploration in the future. There is no question that his recent breakthroughs in filmmaking will also lead to movies that inspire the public’s interest in space sciences.
-Richard
January 8th, 2010 at 2:48 pm
The influence of the people’s camera goes a long way. I have published hundreds of HiRISE images to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written by volunteers. As a former science teacher, I’m describing the geography and geology of Mars, quadrangle by quadrangle, so that any one can understand all the details of the Red Planet. I appreciate all the images and the image descriptions. I’m grateful that anyone can study the images and in their own way, explore Mars. Thanks for your efforts on the HiRISE site.
Jim S.
January 11th, 2010 at 5:26 pm
Put another way, that’s about .7 cents/pixel, or $600/picture, and the price is going down almost every day.
January 17th, 2010 at 10:05 am
Tuvas, could you eloborate on that? How do you know that?
January 20th, 2010 at 6:15 pm
I just saw somewhere that there has been over 10 Teraapixels, and over 10 Terabytes of data from the camera. The math is simple from those numbers.