New feature on the HiRISE website! HiFlyers made of released images like this one:

These are 11×17 PDFs showing cutouts of new releases, so you can print your own posters. Currently these are available for weekly releases starting 3/25/09 – look for more with each week’s new images!

They’re all available on this page. There are also links to the flyers on the individual image pages such as this one: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_011425_1775 (Look for the “HiFLYER” link in the lower right hand side.)

Enjoy!

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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Now you can explore Mars with version 5 of Google’s 3D exploration software (still called Earth)! HiRISE team members worked with Google to make this possible. Previously, you had to perform a few tricks to get it going, but now it is all built in smoothly. To switch to Mars. select the planet drop-down at the top center.

You can enable footprints for HiRISE, CTX, CRISM, Mars Express’ HRSC and Global Surveyor’s MOC.

By clicking on a HiRISE footprint, you can get a window with a hi-res preview and a link to the observation page on our website.

A nice addition is text from (our fellow Tucsonan) William K. Hartmann’s A Traveler’s Guide To Mars, explaining the geologic provinces on Mars (click on the green ‘hiker’ icons).

You can see screenshots and get more info from the unofficial Google Earth blog and download Windows, Mac or Linux versions from Google’s Earth site.

It looks like there is some broad-scale elevation data. Shift+up or down tilts your view, shift + right or left spins, and page up / page down zooms.

Have fun exploring Mars!

We’re in the midst of another HiRISE team meeting here in Tucson. I can’t believe it’s been almost two years since the team meeting I blogged about here. There are a few new faces, but mostly familiar friends that we’ve worked with for years by now. Our two newest Targeting Specialists are meeting the science team for the first time. (They’re actually not that “new” any more – they started last June, but this is their first team meeting.) Some of the other new folks are students and post-docs who are working on interesting research projects using HiRISE data. There are also a few people from JPL here at the meeting, who we talk to on the phone and email often, but we’ve never actually met face-to-face before.

Today during the meeting we are getting updates on all the Science Themes. Our images are divided into groups according to the geologic process that we hypothesize occurred. For each of these themes, a Science Theme Lead is assigned. These “STLs” are Co-Investigators or postdocs who are experts in that area. For example, the Volcanic Processes theme contains images intended to explore phenomena related to volcanism, such as inflated lavas, water-lava interactions, volcanic pits and cones, and mysterious types of collapse features such as the one shown in the anaglyph to the left. As you can read in the caption for that image, we’re still not sure how this feature formed. There are several different possibilities. The image was originally placed in the Impact Processes theme because that was one hypothesis. However, after seeing the high resolution image and stereo data from HiRISE, formation by a meteor impact doesn’t seem as plausible. Collapse after loss of material beneath the surface, such as magma or water, is a better fit to our observations.

Many people ask us if we are still imaging the Phoenix lander, and the answer is yes, as long as there is enough light. Here is our latest view of the landing site, acquired December 21, 2008. Conditions are hazy and dark because as the season approaches northern winter on Mars, the sun does not rise as high in the sky. Looks cold!

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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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!