We were pleased to welcome Linda Ronstadt (!!!) to the HiRISE Operations Center last week. We gave her and a few of her friends & family a presentation about the HiRISE mission, and we showed them some of our images in false color, 3-D and on the HiWall. Linda was incredibly nice and enthusiastic, and she had lots of great questions for us. Turns out rock stars love HiRISE! At least, we hope she enjoyed it as much as we did!

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 the last cycle in MRO’s Primary Science Phase (PSP). Conjunction is coming up, when Mars is behind the Sun, so we won’t be able to communicate with the spacecraft for a few weeks. We’ll get a welcome break during that time – Uplink will have two whole planning cycles off, and Downlink will get a chance to catch up with their processing.

I can’t believe it’s been two years since the last conjunction and the start of PSP! A lot has changed since we started out with those first images. (more…)

Yesterday was the 3-year anniversary of MRO’s launch. A number of people on our team sent MRO birthday wishes over email; here’s a blog card, too.

If spacecraft ages are like cat ages (and I don’t really know why they would be…), MRO is 28 in human years. That actually sounds about right to me – the mission has matured to the point where things are fairly routine (although there are always exceptions!), we’re past the difficult teenage-angst period, and we’re (hopefully!) wiser now about the way we do things, with many life lessons learned. But we’re not “over the hill” yet! In fact, we’re really in our prime right now.

In honor of this date, here’s a present – a video of the MRO launch: a smaller .ram version for Real Player (2 KB) or a larger .mov version for QuickTime (5.4 MB).

We just saw on NASA TV that the first images came down – they look great! The solar panels are deployed, and you can see a bit of the surface with some small rocks. There’s also a really cool horizon image – you can see the polygons we’ve been imaging for years, right up close! — And from a very different perspective, of course!

It seems like we’ve been preparing for the Phoenix mission for such a long time – and now it’s finally close to landing day! T-6 days according to our countdown clock! Things are getting pretty crazy here, and I thought a little overview of how the HiRISE team is supporting the Phoenix mission would be useful.

We’ve been imaging the northern plains for Phoenix since we started our mission (here’s a bunch of reconnaissance images on our website). The first images we got back showed lots of scary boulders (a close-up of one of our Transition images shown to the right), so we sampled other areas and searched for a relatively boulder-free landing spot. The area the Phoenix team finally chose is being called the “Green Valley“, not because of the “green light = safe to go” connotation, but rather because some geological maps made of the area happened to use green as the color for the valley. Perhaps coincidentally, Green Valley is also a town near Tucson, where both Phoenix and HiRISE are based. Whatever the reason, I like that the name has a lovely calm, comforting feel.

Once the Phoenix team picked out their landing site, we worked on a high-resolution mosaic of the entire 3-sigma landing ellipse (”3-sigma” means there is a 99% probability it will land within this area; see this great blog entry on landing ellipses at the Planetary Society). The Phoenix landing ellipse is shown to the left, along with the footprints of a number of HiRISE images. (This was before we were quite done with the mosaic.) These images have helped the Phoenix team characterize the regional geology and assess the safety of the landing site.

In addition to scouting landing sites, we’re also going to be involved with Phoenix during its prime mission on the ground. We’ve been planning and practicing several different ways of cooperating: (more…)

Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman visited the Lunar and Planetary Lab, including the HiRISE Operations Center, today. He’s a former Tucson resident and is giving the 2008 commencement address for the University of Arizona. The Apollo 8 crew were effectively our first interplanetary travelers (as the Earth-Moon system can be called a double planet); the first humans to travel far from the Earth and orbit another world. Their evocative pictures and descriptions of Earth as the only colorful object in the vastness of space they beheld have mesmerized people for 40 years, an anecdote that Mr. Borman recounted today. Their Christmas Eve broadcast in 1968 capped off the most tumultuous year in modern American history (elegantly reconstructed in the episode 1968 in Tom Hank’s From the Earth to the Moon).

Our P.I. gave him an overview of the Mars program, showed slides of HiRISE and also current or upcoming lunar missions. Not surprisingly, the engineering issues interested him; in particular aerobraking, heatshields, planetary protection, and the LCROSS lunar impact experiment. He mentioned how they had some doubt whether their heatshield would work (it was first capsule to come back at interplanetary speeds of around 25,000 mph). He contrasted planetary protection in the Apollo days with the great lengths we go to to remove most microbes from Mars-bound spacecraft; for the Moon landings people were more concerned about what might come back! But LCROSS will deliberately send an upper-stage into an impact trajectory; something he noted that Apollo specifically avoided by sending it on a solar trajectory.

I hope it doesn’t sound too cliché, but it was an honor to meet a real American hero! I think all of us here are real space geeks and considered it a great privilege to meet him.

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On this NPR Science Friday episode, HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen and M.I.T. planetary geophysicist Maria Zuber discuss new results that illuminate the story of water on Mars with host Ira Flatow.

Also, available free on iTunes, are a collection of videos from the Phoenix Mission’s Open House, highlighting the University of Arizona’s Mars-related projects including UofA speakers McEwen, Phoenix P.I. Peter Smith, GRS and TEGA P.I. William Boynton, and planetary geologist Vic Baker.

Finally, during last week’s UofA football game, our marching band played a tribute to Mars and in particular Phoenix with a little ditty written by band director Jay Rees. I don’t know if a recording of the performance is available online, but here’s a snippet of the song:

“Follow the water” is NASA’s song,
UA’s happy to sing along.
We shall see what we shall see.
We might find biology!

Wednesday September 19th, we are posting our first student suggested and captioned image on the website. Last spring, students in grades 3 to 14 in schools from around the world, including Hungary, Nepal, Curaçao, India, Arizona, and New Jersey, participated in the first HIRISE Image Targeting Challenge. They suggested target locations that they thought might hold evidence of water at or near the surface of Mars in the recent past. Then the students had to analyze the returned images, submit a report as a class, and write a figure caption. It often takes a long time to get an image after it has been suggested, even for the team members, because of all of the different constraints, including the season, the roll angle limits, and because there are other instruments on MRO that we coordinate with. However, we got very lucky and were able to get twelve of the student suggested images during the spring semester. Tomorrow we are releasing the first of these images that a third grade class in Arizona suggested and analyzed. It is so exciting to me that 8 and 9 year olds are doing science, not just reading it in a textbook. Each week we will release another student image. Hopefully this has gotten some of the students excited about possibly becoming scientists when they grow up. One day some of them may become team members on a space mission.

We are starting the Fall challenge right now. If you know of a school group that might want to participate, check out the HiRISE Challenge website at: http://quest.nasa.gov/challenges/hirise/
Our first live online chat will be on September 25th.

Mars is currently blanketed by a large dust storm. We first starting seeing it in late June. The MARCI instrument returns global daily mosaics of the planet, which we use like a weather report. These showed several dusty areas, and we had some hopes they would remain merely “regional.” However, in the following days, the storm activity increased, and winds blew the dust around the planet. Most of our images started coming back clouded over with dust. Some are just hazy, and some are completely obscured. Our Principal Investigator, Alfred McEwen, recently pointed out that this dust storm currently active in the Saharan desert on Earth looks very familiar!

At this point, the storm is considered a “hemispherical event,” meaning it’s mainly affecting “only” half of the planet (the southern hemisphere, in this case). We have our fingers crossed that this will not expand and become a global event like the 2001 dust storm.

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