Thanks to our webmaster, and Google, HiRISE pages can now be translated from English to French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German or Arabic.

Here is a tip: once you have translated a page, all pages on the HiRISE website that you click through will be translated, too! There will be a link at the top of your browser to return to the original page. You can also hover over a sentence to see it in the original language, English.

Look for the little flag buttons on the right hand side of an observation page, under the link to Facebook.

We hope our international viewers benefit from this added feature.

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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HiRISE is (finally!) on Twitter! (Now that we’re getting a break during Solar Conjunction, we have time to catch up with trends in technology. )

If you’re not familiar with it, Twitter is kind of like a mini-blog. Posts are limited to 140 characters, which keeps things short & simple. In a way, it’s like updating your “status” in chat or on Facebook. You can use it many different ways – commands work via SMS text messaging, so you can get or make updates with a cell phone or other mobile device; it can hook into instant messaging, chat programs or social networking sites; there are widgets you can download, or simply make & read updates through the website.

To see a great example of how this can work, check out the Phoenix Twitter feed – that was a lot of fun, and also provided timely, award-winning coverage. We don’t aim quite that high, but we hope to give you a heads up about releases, important events, and maybe some random things just for fun. (Suggestions for tweets? Add them in a comment below!)

So follow HIRISE on Twitter to see what we’re doing now!

Our image web pages all have this great map feature (click the image to the right for an example). (It’s been there for a while, so you may have noticed it already.) If you scroll down to the bottom, below the Observation Toolbox, you’ll see a mini context map from Google maps for the specific image whose page you’re viewing. It’s so useful to be able to see the HiRISE footprints placed on a broader view of Mars, showing the surrounding geology. Plus, you can pan and zoom around in the map. Way cool.
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More interesting data from our web statistics: rankings of the most popular images on our website. Some you’d expect to get lots of hits: special campaigns like Phoenix lander hardware and Phobos, and of course old favorites like a certain feature in Cydonia. Others have made a splash in the news, like the avalanche caught in action and a deep pit that might be the entrance to a cave – whether their popularity on our website is a cause or effect of the media coverage.

I find it interesting to see which “regular” images, out of the thousands we’ve taken, caught people’s attention – in May, for example, gullies in a crater wall and ridges in Huo Hsing Vallis (left) were popular. June saw lots of hits on this beautiful image of the north polar layered deposits (above) and this image of delicate-looking, multi-tendriled slope streaks.

In July, the “Mystery Mounds” (PSP_008778_1685 and PSP_008548_2205) were popular, presumably because they are so “mysterious” – ? (By the way, these two areas, despite their similar titles, are nowhere near each other on Mars.) Lesson learned: We should give more of our images “sexy” titles.

Our awesome technical group sent me the link to a page that calculates an overwhelming number of different statistics for our website. Visitors are broken down by country (lots of Canadian fans!), where they go, how long they stay, what browsers they use…. For the most part, I think people come to the HiRISE website to look at our images – which is as it should be! However, I was astonished to see how many hits the HiBlog gets. We don’t get all that many comments (except for the record-breaking MPL search entry), so here I was, thinking we were in a little bubble of self-absorbed anonymity, talking to ourselves….

My protective bubble burst when I saw the number of hits we got over the past few months:

• April: 36,200!
• May: 99,200!
• June: 44,500!
• July: 36,410! (as of this morning)

(The huge number of hits in May was probably due to the combination of the MPL search and the Phoenix imaging.)

…although this could just be 10 people who really love us, hitting “refresh” 4,000 times a month.

I don’t know how this compares to other websites, but I’m humbled and a little intimidated to find we have so many readers! I guess we should write more entries (and better ones!) We’re hoping to recruit some more team members to post, too. Ideas or requests for blog entry topics are welcome! Leave us a comment below.

An overflow crowd of thousands were in rapt attention here on the University of Arizona campus, as they watched the NASA Television coverage of the successful Phoenix Landing. It has been really amazing to see so many people gathered in support of their mission. It was literally standing room only here at the Charles P. Sonett space sciences building that hosts HiROC. There was actually a line to get into the Kuiper space sciences building, and another one for the Flandrau planetarium, while another crowd gathered out on the university Mall, and possibly another group down at the campus bookstore. People began watching attentively at all of these locations starting around an hour before touchdown. Tucson really showed its support for Phoenix today. People actually took down (carefully!) a large hanging mural so they could watch the display from outside the glass window of our building. I could tell that things were going well by the occasional outbursts of applause.

When Peter Smith gave enthusiastic shout outs to the UofA community and to Arizona, the crowd erupted in responsive applause. Congratulations to the Phoenix team and especially to those working on EDL at JPL in Pasadena and Lockheed in Denver.

Join us this Sunday, May 25th from 3-8 PM on the University of Arizona campus for a celebration of the landing of our sister mission, Phoenix. The Kuiper building, Sonett lobby, (that’s where HiROC is located, and where we’ll be) and Flandrau planetarium will be open to the public. There will be speakers from the Phoenix and HiRISE teams, children’s activities, NASA TV running for live updates on the status of the lander, telescopes set up for viewing the sun, tours of the buildings, planetarium shows, and cake!

Detailed schedule of events:
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/calendar/calendar.php?ID=107

We’ll be thinking of the Phoenix team during this critical step – we’ve got our fingers crossed, wishing you the best!

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…)

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!