I was helping to prepare a presentation for a local high school, and I thought it would be cool to show them a picture of their school as HiRISE would see it. My first thought was the satellite layer in Google Maps. So I zoomed way in and took a screenshot. I wasn’t able to find a reference for the pixel scale of the satellite imagery (if anyone knows of one, please leave it in a comment!), so finally I just figured it out myself by using the Distance Measurement Tool. Turns out, if you zoom in as far as possible, the satellite images have almost exactly the same resolution as HiRISE! (This is true in Tucson, anyway; the coverage varies over different locations.) I thought this was a great way to visualize just how awesome HiRISE images are – just imagine looking at Mars like you can look at your home town on Google maps! …I guess that makes the rovers like Mars StreetView.

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

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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One of our team members, Ross Beyer, put together a way of getting MRO data into the Google Earth tool: http://orrery.us/node/54

I finally got around to trying it out, and it’s very easy to set up following his instructions. It allows you to see the footprints of acquired HiRISE images on a larger context map, and the Google [Planet] interface is really easy to use. Clicking on a red H footprint gives you a short description of the image, and a link right to our image release page, where you can browse or download the image products. CTX footprints are available, too. If I’m understanding this right, these KML files pull all currently released data from the PDS, so whenever we release data, the new stuff is automatically included.

The basemaps aren’t in 3-D (yet – maybe someday?!), so the perspective view isn’t much use, but you can kind of trick yourself into thinking it looks 3-D with the shaded relief maps. You can “fly” over the planet, zooming in & out, which is really fun.

I had trouble trying to get two basemaps visible at once (colorized MOLA elevation over the greyscale MDIM). With just one basemap, though, it works just fine, and it’s very fast (this probably depends a lot on your internet connection).

One really nice thing about the Google interface is when there are two overlapping footprints (which all of our stereo images are), clicking on them expands the choices and allows you to pick one or the other. Other tools I’ve used don’t handle this as nicely, and sometimes it’s impossible to select the “bottom” one.

Nice job, Ross & Google!

This past summer the IAU met in Prague to decide the fate of Pluto, and also to give names to several craters on Mars. After more than two years after I submitted the request, a fresh and rayed Martian crater now officially bears the name Gratteri. Gratteri is the birthplace of my Father, my Grandfather and their forefathers going back as far as back as any Tornabene can remember. Gratteri is a small medieval town of only 1100 people, but once was a more heavily populated duchy that ruled the Madonie region from the coast to the mountain tops. Unbenownst to me at the time I submitted my suggestion to the IAU, was the etymology of the name. By a staggering coincidence, the name Gratteri is derived from the Greek word ‘krater‘ meaning a basin or bowl to mix wine and water (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krater), which in the English language has come to signify a quasi-circular pit formed by an explosion (volcanic or hypervelocity impact). I was floored to say the least! Not only did I come to study these features on Earth, Mars and other bodies as my lifelong passion, but it was also the name of the town of my ancestral origins!

Well, soon I will be in Italy for the MRO PSG in Rome and then for the Terrestrial Analogues meeting in Trento. After these two meetings, I will be taking three days off to go down to Sicily for a long overdue break. My parents await me in Gratteri, and it will be so nice to meet them there for my second visit. I am particularly excited as I will be bringing a HiRISE image of the Martian Gratteri crater to present to the Mayor and townsfolk. In addition to a poster print out of the HiRISE image taken during our first cycle, I will be bringing an annotated version that I made and would like to share with you here. I used Google Earth to find Gratteri and acquired the satellite image along with the proper scale so that I could superimpose it on the HiRISE image. Gratteri is the cluster of buildings on the right with the cutout being approximately 2.5 km in width. The Martian crater Gratteri is almost 7 km in diameter. I was once again reminded, and immediately humbled, by the shear scale of this crater that I claim to know so much about! I’m amazed how big this rather small Martian crater is in relation to our terrestrial stomping grounds.

Well, I best be off. I still have so much packing to do! Not to mention, I haven’t even finished my talk yet…

Ciao miei Amici! Ci vediamo dopo!

Tuvas posted this great top-ten list over on Unmanned Spaceflight.

I changed it around a bit, hope you don’t mind, T!

1. You consider any image with less than a billion pixels a mere pittance… a negligible amount of data.
2. You realize that any part of Mars can be interesting, if viewed at sufficiently high resolution.
3. You start to see in black and white away from the “Center strip” of your eyes.
4. You have decided to buy a 500 Gigabyte drive just to store a few dozen of your favorite HiRISE Images.
5. You’re considering getting a new 40″ LCD mainly to look at HiRISE Images.
6. You know what JPEG 2000 is.
7. You start making up new Hi Names (HiStuff, HiSpace, etc, etc).
8. You continually refresh the web page starting Wednesday morning, waiting for the next release.
9. When using Google Earth, you wish you could zoom in further, just like HiRISE can.
10. You’re reading this!