GeoTIFF is an industry standard for embedding geographic information in images. Beginning soon, HiRISE RDRs will include GeoTIFF info in the Jpeg-2000 files. All of the information about the image will continue to be in the RDR label (.LBL plain text file), but with this additional info in the JP2, image viewing software that supports GeoTIFF will be able to take advantage of it.

For example, such software could display the actual coordinates on Mars of the pixels you are looking at, allow you to measure features directly in physical units, or stitch together images based on their absolute location on the planet. A number of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) applications use GeoTIFF; many on our science team have been waiting patiently for this feature to be rolled out.

We have already begun to produce RDRs with GeoTIFF, and they will start appearing in our weekly releases. At some point, a major reprocessing effort will be underway to bring this feature (and others) to all of our pre-existing products.

This brings up the topic of versioning: namely, how to tell which version of a HiRISE product you are working with.

(more…)

On Easter Sunday, HiRISE took two observations of the Martian satellite Phobos. This is the larger of the red planet’s two satellites. We took two color images at slightly different angles, so we could combine them to make a three-dimensional stereo image.

It was another special sequence that had to be specially designed, commanded, tested and re-tested before it executes on board the spacecraft. Many people from JPL and LMA worked to make this happen, as well as almost everyone on the uplink team here at HiROC. In addition, the date chosen meant that people had to come in and work on a holiday to support it. So we were thrilled when the images arrived Sunday night, and we saw that they are PERFECT! The focus, timing, and pointing were bang-on, and we got a beautiful exposure of the satellite in both images.

I wish I could give you a sneak peak, but we’re still processing the images. The downlink group has to do a lot of work on special images like these. Because they’re not normal Mars images, the normal calibration routines and processing pipelines can’t be used. Much of this work has to be done by hand. We’re also trying to get some additional products together that we don’t usually release; I think you’ll like them!

So this is really just a teaser. We’re planning on releasing the Phobos images next week, so keep an eye on the website! In the meantime, here’s a warmup act: views of Phobos from previous missions, MGS (above right) and Mars Express (left).

ETA: The data are now available here: http://www.uahirise.org/phobos.php

I want to point out this awesome new feature on our website. This week’s captioned releases were accompanied by a really cool movie. It scrolls over some areas of the images in high resolution. It’s a nice way to cruise around the observations, and I love how it shows off the color. This might be an easier way to quickly browse the images for people who don’t use the IAS Viewer.

The movie might be a little hard to find; if you click on the “Updated: 19 March 2008″ link in the upper right of our main page, it will take you to this page, which shows this week’s releases. There, in the lower right corner, there are links to the scroll clip. It’s available in Quicktime, an “AppleTV” format (which plays for me in iTunes), and a smaller one for your iPhone. There’s even a groovy soundtrack! Thanks to our masterful webmaster who put this together. Let us know how you like it!

The latest, and most massive, release of HiRISE image data to the Planetary Data System includes such gems as the previously mentioned “Caught in Action: Avalanches on North Polar Scarps (PSP_007338_2640)” and “The Earth & Moon as Seen from Mars (PSP_005558_9040 and PSP_005558_9045)“.

How much data was released? 2422 observations, making up 9.9 terabytes “in over 225,599 standard PDS and extras products” according to our database specialist. This was for data between orbit ranges 4400 and 6999, or between July 05, 2007 and January 23, 2008 (which is a lot of loops around the Red Planet!)

We have now released a total of 16.8 TB worth of data, or nearly 500,000 image products. Please check out the latest images on the HiRISE website on the “March 2008: New HiRISE Images Released to the Planetary Data System” page.

These data have been processed, and reprocessed when necessary, with the latest automated pipelines on our production processing cluster. We continue to make changes to the software, however, and will have to reprocess all of these data yet again in a few months. What you see today is gorgeous and as complete as currently possible, but we always want to tweak our calibration, color, and geometry pipelines to make these even better.

This release places us very far ahead of the MRO project’s expectations for the HiRISE team. We are now working on speeding up our releases even more, so that they occur more often. That means we will probably never have such a large release again, which, as far as us downlink folks are concerned is a very good thing. Making sure 9.9 terabytes of data is ready to release is hard work. The images and new findings make it worth it, though!

• PDS Imaging Node: http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/
• MRO PDS page: http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/Missions/MRO_mission.html
• HiRISE Volume: http://hirise-pds.lpl.arizona.edu/PDS/

HiRISE caught an avalanche in action! http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_007338_2640

It was so exciting to find this image! The image was intended to be part of a series of seasonal monitoring observations of a dune field. We’re watching to see how the winter carbon dioxide frost disappears as spring comes to the northern polar areas (which is pretty cool in itself! See PSP_007043_2650, for example.) PSP_007338_2640 happened to be the first image we took after powering back on after a safing event. So we were examining the image to make sure the camera was still working OK (it is – as you can see from this beautiful image & the many others we’ve taken since!). If it hadn’t been for that, we might not have noticed this for weeks! (In case you haven’t noticed, we have a LOT of images to look at! )

My first reaction was just, “What is that?” So I asked some of the scientists around HiROC, and they got excited, too. Everyone was talking about it all day, putting together ad-hoc color products (the full color processing takes a while to get through our processing pipelines) and looking at other images nearby for similar events. Because this was part of a series of images in the same spot, we had a “before” image as well (PSP_007140_2640). It’s a little hard to compare the two images because the bright carbon dioxide frost is changing as well, and we took the two images from different angles. But you can see in the second image that there are some spots up above on the cliff that are missing their bright frost covering. Perhaps that’s where the rock (or ice) fall started? The springtime sun is warming these icy layers, which could cause sublimation (solid ice changing to gas). Certainly there is a lot of dust being raised to form this big cloud, too, whether the dust was mixed in with the ice blocks, or just kicked up off the lower, dustier layers. As we continue monitoring this site and other polar areas, we’re sure to learn a lot more about the processes captured in this image.

ETA: Emily Lakdawalla made a great animation of the before/after shots, posted on the Planetary Society blog. So cool!

On Friday, HiRISE released over 1200 color observations. This was our first large release of the color products (not counting the 140+ images of MSL candidate sites released back in October). I was asked recently if our images look fairly similar to one another, or if they are all completely different. Well, you can now judge that for yourselves, but I feel the answer clearly tends toward the latter. The variety of terrain types on Mars is wider than you might have expected, and everywhere you look you’ll find something spectacular.

But I’d like to showcase one image in particular. Within this single image, there is a remarkable progression of landforms, in a view running down a small portion in the interior of Valles Marineris, the “Grand Canyon of Mars.” Here are a selected set of sub-images from the RGB color product; each thumbnail links to a larger view. All of the original products are available at our website.

At the top of the image is a flat, cratered plain, very much what one thinks of as typically Martian. The edge is abrupt, leading immediately to a steep descent crossing multiple layers of bedrock. The accumulating aprons of debris are channeled down between rocky ridges.

A number of boulder tracks are visible, remnants of mighty tumbles. You can follow one of these tracks for something like a kilometer down into the middle portion of the image. Here is a small part of this track.

Farther down, a network of scalloped terrain has formed in what must be a transition zone from the upper, steeper section and the lower, flatter step. What’s interesting to me about this section is, as shown in the image below, the scalloped edges form a stunning pattern of bifurcation.

(more…)

Starting with the 10/10 release, color images are included for the first time. We’ll describe how we process these in the days and weeks to come. But what I’d like to do first is give a brief description of all our product types as they currently are available. You’ve no doubt noticed a mind-boggling array of new options on our product pages. They now include what we call our “NOMAP” products; NOMAP means that they are not map-projected. In other words, not rotated to the direction of north, not mapped to a coordinate system, and not scaled to any particular geometric resolution.

I’ve prepared this ugly table that outlines each of the products now available (excluding the raw EDRs). So reading the columns from left to right: there are three types of “NOMAP” products, two types of lossy “QLOOK” (Quicklook) RDRs, and two types of lossless RDRs.

With that as a reference, now I’ll try to define everything more precisely.

“NOMAP”

Non map-projected product. Always lossy compressed for smaller size and quicker viewing. These are not formal Planetary Data System products; they’re “special”, meaning there is no PDS label and no Software Interface Specification describing them. Available for IRB, RGB and RED.

RDR

Reduced Data Record: reduced in the sense of refined or processed, not raw data. Formal PDS products with accompanying labels and a detailed SIS document describing their format and processing steps. Available both in lossless and quicklook formats for both RED & COLOR.

“QLOOK”

Quicklook: a special product that is a lossy compressed version of the RDR. In a normal RDR, all of the original data is retained. But with a quicklook, some of the highest resolution detail is discarded to make for quicker viewing.

RED

The image obtained by the red-filtered CCDs. It will be over the full swath width, typically data from all ten red CCDs. Covers the visible wavelength band from 550 to 850 nanometers.

IR

Infrared. Covers the near-IR wavelengths from 800-1000 nanometers.

BG

Blue-Green, visible wavelengths from 400-600 nm.

COLOR

A color RDR. It contains data from the IR, BG and center RED ccds. Typically this will be a skinny strip (”center swath”) inside a skinny strip, or as I like to say, the bacon-strip effect.

IRB

An enhanced color NOMAP. It has the same color bands as the RDR: IR, RED and BG.

RGB

An enhanced color NOMAP. It contains only data from the RED and BG. The blue is derived from the difference between the RED and BG. The color bands are RED, BG and the synthetic blue.

EDR

Experiment Data Record, a formal PDS product that is raw uncompressed data with a label header.

Note: we will be working towards making all of these products available for all prior releases.

Three HiRISE papers are coming out in a special issue of the journal Science today. Our science team has been working hard on analyzing the images we take, and they’ve discovered some interesting things.

One paper talks about a few aspects of the history of water on Mars: HiRISE images of “rock glaciers” and bright deposits in gullies that might be extremely recent. HiRISE observations of an area called Athabasca Valles were used to show that it is actually covered with a thin veneer of lava. A third paper discusses thin layers in the North Polar cap. HiRISE is able to discern very fine layering (seen in an excerpt of image PSP_001636_2760 at left), as well as the color and thickness of each layer. Since these layers were laid down over hundreds of thousands of years of Martian history, they provide a record of climate change on the planet.

You can find a lot of things on the HiRISE website that are impossible to include in a print journal – like full-resolution color versions of the images from the papers, and (my favorite) cool 3-D flyover movies of the stereo observations. Our webmaster designed this lovely page for accessing these special products. Have fun flying over Mars!

Spacecraft missions are complicated endeavors that result in a wealth of scientific and engineering data. Long after the mission has ended, these data can be extremely useful for later study and discovery. With so many missions over so many years, how can later generations find and make use of these data?

The solution for many NASA missions has been the development of the centralized Planetary Data System (PDS). The PDS is several things: a collection of websites, a search capability, an archive, a database, a learning tool, etc. The PDS Imaging Node is located at http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/ and acts as “the curator of NASA’s primary digital image collections from past, present and future planetary missions.” These missions include Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, and many more. Now the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been added to the list, with the HiRISE team releasing our first several months of image data.

• MRO PDS page: http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/Missions/MRO_mission.html
• MRO Product Search page: http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/search/index.jsp
• HiRISE Volume: http://hirise-pds.lpl.arizona.edu/PDS/

What we have released is an archive of the HiRISE Experiment Data Records (EDRs) and Reduced Data Records (RDRs). EDRs are in the *.IMG file format and represent individual CCD channels (remember, there are 14 CCDs in the HiRISE camera and two channels per CCD, for a total of 28 channels). These EDRs are cleaned up, calibrated, stitched together, and mapped to Mars’ geometry, resulting in the RDR products. RDRs are in the *.JP2 and *.LBL formats. JPEG2000 is the technology that enables us to offer our gigantic images to the scientific community and the public in a timely and efficient manner. An observation’s image data are in the *.JP2 file and its meta data are in the detached *.LBL files. To view these products, JPEG2000 compatible software is required (see our site for a list of offerings).

While we have been trying to release up to five captioned images a week for the past few months, the PDS release represents several hundred images, most of them without captions. You can find them using the PDS search capabilities, and you can also find them on the new HiRISE site, unveiled today to coincide with this first PDS release. The redesigned site focuses on the images while providing, hopefully, a more user-friendly interface:

• HiRISE Site: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/
• “About Our Redesign”: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/profil.php
• Images released to the PDS: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/pds_release.php

As word gets out about the new site and the PDS release, you may experience some site slowness. Please be patient, and thank you for your interest!

(I originally posted this on another blog on Wednesday, April 11. It is also appropriate here.)

Once upon a time Richard Hoagland was my role model and Carl Sagan was not. While Sagan was a media hog, Hoagland fought the good fight against the government conspiracy that hid evidence of alien intelligences and the artifacts left throughout the solar system by an ancient alien civilization.

There was, after all, the “Face”.

During college, I overdosed on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. I left pseudoscience behind. I saw Hoagland for the charlatan he really was (and is), and I came to appreciate Sagan for his reason, his passion, and his inspiring desire to educate.

Now, years later I work for HiRISE, participating in an experiment to photograph the surface of Mars using a high resolution camera. We had to take yet another image of the Cydonia region on Mars, because of the history, because of the public interest, because of the desire to leave silliness behind and instead embrace the wonder of reality.

Today the image was released (see the various image options, including the highest resolution JPEG2000 version), along with other gorgeous views of the Martian surface.

This then is the real face of Mars, a boulder-strewn mesa carved not by imaginary entities but by the slow yet steady erosion caused by winds, impacts, physical failure of rocks, and perhaps temperature variations.

I think that while I believed in the “Face” I could not have had the dream job I do today. I would not know the joy I know today, the joy that comes from seeing Mars not as I use to want it to be, but Mars as it really is. This is the real Mars, far more exciting and full of wonder and mystery than Hoagland’s fantasy version.

If a dedication means anything at all, then I dedicate this post to Carl Sagan, a person I did not appreciate while he was alive, but who has taught me so much through the legacy of his words. I now look at Mars with “skeptical thinking and an aptitude for wonder,” the two skills he highlighted in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.