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?

• 446 RDRs, 0.18 TB
• 6238 EDRs, 0.18 TB
• 5126 RDR Extras, 0.28 TB
• 12,464 EDR Extras 2.5 GB
• 16 Anaglyphs 0.001 TB

Totals for this release: 24,274 images, 0.62 TB

This brings our total released product numbers and data volume to:

• 23,122 RDRs, 12.2 TB
• 323,358 EDRs, 10.6 TB
• 196,058 RDR Extras, 15.6 TB
• 625,233, EDR Extras, 0.1 TB
• 1,192 Anaglyphs 0.5 TB

Total: 1,167,771 images, 37.7 TB

Just because we are not currently taking images does not mean we are slacking off. The Downlink team is busy reprocessing and validating all ESP observations. After reprocessing, these observations will all benefit from the same improvements we have made to our processing pipelines over the past several months. I also recently started reprocessing PSP observations, which is a much larger data set that will sync improvement to our processing pipelines made over the past few years! We are keeping busy and we are even getting help from the Uplink team while they wait for the go ahead to start taking new images of the Martian surface. Of course we all want that to happen as quickly as possible!

Ice excavated from the subsurface, by a crater 6m (20 feet) in diameter, sublimates away over the course of the martian summer. Each of these HiRISE images are 35m (115 feet) across and were taken in October 2008 and January 2009.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

An exciting new paper came out in yesterday’s issue of Science magazine, with HiRISE team member Shane Byrne as the lead author. Water ice has been discovered being exposed by fresh Martian craters!

This is exciting for several reasons: first, these are very tiny craters – only a few meters (yards) across. This means they’re not excavating very deep into the crust of Mars. So the ice has to be really shallow – less than a few feet below the surface! Secondly, the location of these craters is surprising – they’re between 40-55 degrees north latitude. This is far from the polar regions, where we’d expect to find ice (for example, where the Phoenix mission landed at 68 degrees north, ice was found by digging down into the dirt).

The third exciting aspect of this ice is its purity. We’d expect this ice to be mixed in with dirt and dust and rock. Instead, we found that it’s 99% pure ice! (Only 1% is dirt mixed in.) This can be measured because we watched the ice disappear over time. By taking repeated images of the same spot, HiRISE got a time sequence as the ice slowly faded. It faded so slowly that it has to be almost all ice – a dirtier mixture would have faded much faster as it sublimated (went directly from a solid to a gas) in Mars’s extremely dry atmosphere.

Speaking of dry atmospheres, this also has interesting implications about the history of the Martian climate – there had to have been more water vapor in the atmosphere in the recent past than we previously thought. We still have lots of questions about how this ice formed, how much of it there is, and how many more of these craters we’ll find. Luckily, we’ve got a long mission ahead of us to explore these issues!

This discovery is also a great example of how the instruments on MRO work together. CTX initially detected these new craters as “dark spots,” and HiRISE followed up to confirm that they’re really impact craters. Some of those HiRISE images revealed some very bright white material, and then CRISM confirmed that material really is water ice. The instruments worked together to accomplish the best combined science. Go team! ☺

Here are some more detailed stories, images, and multi-media:

• Really nice movie with Shane Byrne talking about the discovery and excellent animations showing the locations of the craters and the time-evolution of the ice disappearing: NASA multimedia – then go to “Video Gallery” on the right, and click on “Mars – Exposed”.

• NASA press release, and all of the images and materials from the press conference

• UA news story

We’ve seen many more news stories & blogs – thanks for the interest, everyone! It’s great that everyone thinks this is as exciting as we do! ☺

• 2,996 RDRs, 1 TB
• 42,370 EDRs, 1 TB
• 34,481 RDR Extras, 1.6 TB
• 83,784 EDR Extras, 0.02 TB
• 636 Anaglyphs, 0.01 TB

Totals for this release: 163,631 image products, 3.6 TB

This brings our total released product numbers and data volume to:

• 22,676 RDRs, 12 TB
• 317,120 EDRs, 10.4 TB
• 192,270 RDR Extras, 15.3 TB
• 612,769 EDR Extras, 0.1 TB
• 2,892 Anaglyphs, 0.5 TB

Total: 1,148,363 images, 37.5 TB

In summary, we released nearly 1500 observations, most of those with both black & white and color RDR products. Several newer observations matched up with older observations from a slightly different angle of the same location on the surface, resulting in 636 awesome new anaglyphs. The RDRs are the fully processed, geometrically projected products best for scientific inquiry. If you really want to, though, anyone can download and process HiRISE data from scratch. You can do this using ISIS software, which is publicly available for free download. See the ISIS Web site for download information, processing instructions, and tutorials.

Starting this week, I will be looking over the observations taken August 6 through August 26 before MRO went into safe mode and make sure they are ready for release. We plan to release these images in early October. We are also in the process of reprocessing those Extended Science Phase mission images prior to all the latest processing pipeline fixes and updates.  Once we are satisfied with that data set, we will release them to the public and then start reprocessing the images from the Primary Science Phase…a major project that should keep me and the rest of Downlink busy for several months!

We are going to try to Twitter a planning cycle for the HiRISE (http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu) experiment. The idea is to give people a feeling of all the work we have to do to get images from Mars out of a very special piece of equipment. Here are a couple of things you need to know to follow what is going on.

The scientist in charge of the scientific support for the cycle is called the CIPP. For cycle 75, that is @nick_space. Nick will be assisted by his Post-Doc., Anya, who is @mozhetbyt

The targeting specialist ensures that the plan produced can be implemented and keeps the CIPP from doing anything stupid. The targeting specialist is called the HiTS and for cycle 75 that is @laughingrid.

The HiRISE project has its own Twitter account (@HiRISE) which can also be followed.
We will try to use #hitwycle as a search hashtag for tweets.

We are attempting to run the cycle remotely. In the early stages of the mission, people had to travel to Tucson when they were CIPP. But now we can use special computers at our home institute. In this case, the CIPP is working from the University of Bern while the HiTS is sitting in Tucson, Arizona. This is the biggest time zone difference we have in the HiRISE project for this type of activity but it is not the only one. The HiTS interacts with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (JPL) and we have a lot of contact with the CRISM team (the infrared spectrometer system which is an instrument used to determine surface mineralogy) at the Applied Physics Lab of Johns Hopkins Uni on the US East Coast. They have their own web-site (http://crism.jhuapl.edu) which you can also look at.

We use a planning tool called HiPlan (developed by @HiCommander who is unfortunately on vacation this week) and entering targets into the system involves working with HiPlan. We have some short-cut names for things such as

• IO (interactive observation where we point the spacecraft at a specific target)
• NIO (non-interactive obs where we let the camera view an interesting area the spacecraft is already passing over)
• RA (ridealongs where CRISM or CTX asks the spacecraft to point and we take a look along with them)
• MHs (must-have are targets we really need to get this cycle – normally because of the lighting conditions)
• WTHs (wanna-have are targets which scientists need quickly to confirm a paper result or to fill in something they are really interested in)

We will talk sometimes about specific areas on Mars. You can follow that by using the Mars plug-in for Google Earth. It’s easy to download and run if you have a reasonably fast internet connection. (Google maps on Mars is also good if you can’t install a program: http://www.google.com/mars/) We will try to remember to send coordinates on Mars to help you find what we are looking at.

We will tweet when we can to tell you what is going on. I will try to answer questions you send about the planning process, what we are doing, and Mars science (if I can). Note that if there is a major incident (e.g. we find a dinosaur-bone or the spacecraft explodes) I will not be able to tweet that because items of that sort need to be officially released by NASA. These events are however very, very, unlikely.

The cycle plans two weeks of HiRISE operations and is split into week 1 and week 2. The planning process began on August 20th (although the first few days of the process are very light in terms of what’s going on). The cycle procedure actually lasts around 4 weeks in total because planning must be followed up by reviewing the results.

Please note that we can’t accept requests for images through Twitter right now, although we will be accepting public image requests in the near future (stay tuned!). Also I reserve the right to block you if you become a pain in the butt! (Examples of pain in the butt behavior are: constantly hassling me about the face on Mars, repeated tweets about aliens, discussions about whether we have actually been on the Moon, etc…..)

If you are a regular follower of @nick_space but not interested in this stuff, I will not complain/be upset/etc. if you stop following me for the next few weeks. After that though……

Hope you find it interesting.

@nick_space

UA job posting website

If you live in Tucson, you might be interested to know that we’re looking for a new HiRISE Targeting Specialist (HiTS) here at HiROC!

Our faithful blog readers are probably already familiar with some of what the HiTS do, but for the rest of you, here are some past entries related to different aspects of the job:

• Welcome, Newbies! – Training other new HiTS
• ESP so far – In the extended mission, things are (supposedly!) easier…
• How big are our feet? – Planning software HiTS use, HiPlan
• High data rate and HiTemp – Some of the challenges of planning images
• Looking Back – Special sequence commanding

I’ve found it to be an exciting and rewarding job, but it’s not an easy one. You need to be the type of person who thrives under pressure; can deal with firm deadlines, but is also creative and self-motivated in between deadlines; pays attention to small details, but can also “see the big picture” (so to speak ). You need to be able to communicate with, and translate between, people with diverse backgrounds and experience, from researchers on the science team to NASA engineers. Ideally, you’d have some relevant scientific background (planetary science, astronomy, or geology, for example), be familiar with UNIX and some programming, and most importantly, be excited about exploring Mars!

To view the complete job description, requirements, and apply online, click this link to the University of Arizona job listing. If you have any questions about the job, please leave them in the comments below!

The park also has wonderful examples of glacial geology. HiRISE has taken images of many features thought to be related to glaciers, so it’s important to understand the terrestrial analogs that lead scientists to think these are evidence of flowing ice on Mars. For example, we hiked along a moraine composed of jumbled rocks the Grinnell Glacier left behind as it flowed downhill. In addition to the remains of the (rapidly disappearing) glacier itself, we also saw typical glacial erosional structures such as U-shaped valleys, hanging valleys, and cirques. For a HiRISE image of cirque-like features, see PSP_005730_1405.

On one of our field trips, we were accompanied by reporter Michael Jamison of The Missoulian. This story was on the front page of the paper the following day:

I thought the story was really good – a quirky (but so are we!) description of why we would want to stare at the rocks in such a magnificent setting, and their relevance to our mission to Mars. We all thought it was funny when he called Alfred McEwen, our Principle Investigator, a “Marsman”!

HiRISE Team in Glacier National Park, in front of a classic U-shaped valley carved by glacial erosion.

Artist's rendition of Mars Polar Lander in 3-D

The Unmanned Spaceflight forums have a long discussion on the previous search efforts. Many candidates were proposed, and the community’s discussion about them is quite enlightening.

Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society also started a coordinated search effort last year. I don’t know if that effort is still ongoing, but her page on how to use HiRISE images in the search is still a great resource. It includes examples of known hardware, cosmic ray hits and other artifacts, and more tips on searching.

In addition to the list of images on the previous blog entry, these new images have been released: (we’ll try to keep this list up to date as more are released)

• ESP_013368_1035
• ESP_013078_1030
• ESP_013223_1025
• ESP_013289_1035
• ESP_013566_1025
• ESP_013500_1035
• ESP_013711_1030
• ESP_013724_1030
• ESP_013935_1030
• ESP_013790_1035
• ESP_014001_1040
• ESP_014080_1040

Thanks for all your interest, and good luck searching!

9/2/09: ETA new images released in September PDS release.

It appears that a recent Java patch causes problems launching the IAS Viewer client and other Java-based software launched via Java Web Start. The update changed the location of the Java Web Start application so that the system opens the downloaded JNLP file as a text file, most likely with something called Dashcode. One of our system administrators found a solution on an Apple support discussion archive. You should only have to do this once to fix the problem:

1. Find any *.jnlp file in the Finder. These may be on your Desktop, or in a download folder, depending on how your web browser is configured.
2. Highlight the file by clicking on it, then select ‘Get Info’ from the File menu.
3. In the Open with: section, click on the popup menu and select ‘Other…’.
4. In the file chooser window that pops up, under Devices, pick the hard disk icon that corresponds to the name of your system hard disk (probably has the same name as your computer).
5. From there, select the System folder, then Library, then CoreServices, and scroll down to find the Java Web Start application, select it and click the ‘Add’ button. (Note, the location of Java Web Start application may differ on your system.)
6. Back in the Get Info window, click the button that says change all to apply this change to all of your JNLP files, then close the Get Info window.

When something tries to open a .jnlp file now, it should be properly handled by Java Web Start, launching the corresponding application.

Thanks to one of our twitter followers, @doug_ellison, for pointing out that many of you are having this problem!

Please note, we offer this for informative purposes, and you should make changes at your own discretion.