The response to HiWish has been incredible! We’ve had well over one hundred target suggestions from the public since launch. Here are some more questions and answers that will go in our FAQ.

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.

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!

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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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.