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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We’re just finishing up four days of having the whole HiRISE team visiting us here in Tucson. It’s been a great team meeting! We had updates on operations, and heard a lot about science results from HiRISE images. Some CRISM and THEMIS team members participated, too, so we got to see what other teams are doing and talk about collaborating and using multiple data sets. People are doing really exciting things with HiRISE data!

Also, our team is really growing!

You’ll notice a lot of new faces compared to a few years ago!

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Sorry we haven’t been posting much lately!

To tell the truth, some of us are experiencing a little bit of a lull. We’re in conjunction right now — this means that the Sun is directly between Earth and Mars, so we can’t communicate with the spacecraft. (Here’s a link with a few diagrams to illustrate this.)

The HiRISE instrument is turned off, and we’re not taking any images. However, there are other activities going on at HiROC….

We start imaging again on November 8, and a few of us are already planning for that. PSP, the Primary Science Phase, is divided into two-week cycles. The first cycle is rm001, the second rm002, etc. Each cycle has a Targeting Specialist assigned to it (this one isn’t me, or I wouldn’t have time to write this!). The Targeting Specialist works with a member of the science team, the “Co-Investigator of the Pay Period,” (”pay period” because of the two-week cycle) or CIPP. The CIPP helps to choose scientifically important targets, and the Targeting Specialist does the scheduling and commanding. They work together on coordinating with other teams, choosing camera parameters, etc. There are a lot of details that need to be worked out!

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These past few weeks have been really busy for the operations personnel in HiROC (the HiRISE Operations Center). I have spent the past two weeks working with other HiRISE team members to design and command the observations that will take place in a few hours. (more…)