This blog entry describes it in much more detail, from when we tried to do this last fall. Unfortunately, that time the spacecraft went into safe mode, and we had to stop the experiment. Here’s hoping for better luck this time! :\

Cast of characters:

One difference is that this time the CIPP (@nick_space) is here in Tucson. So it’s pretty easy to walk over to his office and ask him a question. Despite that, we’ve actually had a few discussions over twitter instead. Talk about lazy!! The good side of that is that you get to follow the day-to-day planning and see what it’s really like to plan two weeks of HiRISE images!

Links:

What are some strategies to improve my suggestion’s chances?

First, make sure you justify the image in terms of small-scale features that might be seen, things like boulders or thin layers or dunes, not giant volcanoes or channels. We need to know how HiRISE’s meter-scale resolution is necessary, especially if there are existing MOC, CTX, HSRC or other images of the area.

Second, choose an appropriate science theme. There are one-sentence descriptions below the map, and detailed descriptions via clicking on the science theme name.

Third, choose a location on Mars that isn’t very popular—avoid regions with lots of other suggestions. Other suggestions are shown with white markers (when you are zoomed in on the map).

How long might it take for my image to be taken and released?

This is very difficult to predict. First, there’s the caveat that we can’t guarantee that we’ll get to it. It depends on how highly a Science Theme Lead prioritizes it. They look at suggestions on a monthly basis. Uplink, downlink and validation are a matter of weeks. And, our PDS releases occur on a monthly basis. So in the absolute best case, it is a matter of months. Remember that you are competing against other suggestions and for the STL’s prioritization.

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?

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

Governor Janet Napolitano visits the HiROC lobby in February 2006

My favorite part is when people have questions for us – even when I don’t know the answers. Because, honestly, that’s what science is – we don’t always have the answers, but that’s what makes it exciting! It’s also fun to find out which aspects of the mission inspire other people, and I get a different perspective on what they think is interesting (versus just what I think is interesting!). Some of the questions are really good, too! We were talking with some middle-school students from El Paso, Texas, and their questions were so astute. One girl asked, “Does Mars have plate tectonics?” Another good question was, “How do we know about the interior of Mars?” These are great questions, and HiRISE is helping scientists to answer these and other questions, along with data from many other instruments studying Mars.

In case you were curious about these particular questions, like these kids were, here are some short answers and references for more information:

• Does Mars have plate tectonics?

  It doesn’t now, but it might have in the past. The crust of Mars is thicker and stronger than that of Earth, so it’s more difficult to break it apart into plates and start subducting them below one another. However, there is some evidence that Mars may have had active plate tectonics early in its history. Maybe the presence of water in the crust weakened the rock enough to allow plate tectonics. HiRISE is investigating evidence of water in the Martian past, which may help illuminate this issue.

  For more reading:

  1. “Plate Tectonics . . . on Mars” Science News Magazine Volume 155, Number 18 (May 1, 1999) (article)
  2. Sleep, N.H. 1994. Martian plate tectonics. Journal of Geophysical Research 99, 5639. (scientific paper)
  3. Nimmo, F., Stevenson, D.J. 2000. Influence of early plate tectonics on the thermal evolution and magnetic field of Mars. Journal of Geophysical Research 105, 11969-11980. (scientific paper)
• How do we know about the interior of Mars?

  HiRISE and other cameras can only take pictures of the surface of Mars. So how do we know so much about what’s inside the planet? For example, we know that Mars has an upper crust, a mantle, and a dense core, like the Earth.

  One way to see beneath the surface is to use impact craters – they punch holes through the crust and expose deeper rocks. HiRISE has imaged a lot of craters! There is also an instrument on the MRO spacecraft with HiRISE called SHARAD, which uses radar to see buried layers of rock and ice. We know about the deeper interior of the planet from spacecraft that have been orbiting Mars for decades and measuring how gravity, heat flow, and the magnetic field vary over different areas. We can also measure the elevation of different features, and that tells us something about what’s underneath. For example, a tall mountain may have very deep roots that extend into the mantle. Scientists also make theoretical models of the planet based on what we know about the physics and chemistry of how it formed and has evolved. There is still a lot of work to be done in this area, and scientists hope future missions will tell us more about the Martian interior. For example, a seismic

  For more reading:

  1. “Martian Interior” (2007) European Space Agency. (article)
  2. Zuber, M.T. 2001. The crust and mantle of Mars. Nature 412, 220-227. (scientific paper)
  3. Planetary Interiors by W. Hubbard (book, general to all planets)

This is my neighborhood as HiRISE would see it: (Look at all those pools! Tucson is not nearly as dry as Mars )

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!

http://mission-madness.nasa.gov/mm/bracket.html

HiRISE is on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), but MRO in its bracket is currently losing to LCROSS, which is some moon impactor mission that hasn’t even launched yet!  Ridiculous!

You can vote as many times as you want:

• Click on the mission
• Click on the blue arrow to move it into the next round
• Click the big basketball in the center to submit.

Also, you should vote for the Mars Exploration Rovers.  And all things Mars related. Oh, and Voyager 1 and 2.  Oh, and Cassini.

GO MRO!!!!

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!