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!

That’s GuyMac on the left, HiCommander (me!) in the middle, and HiKu on the right.

HiKu is part of the operations staff on the uplink side of things. He’s on the team that does the targeting and the planning. What was he doing on a Saturday? Same thing he does every day: targeting and planning.

GuyMac and I are part of the software development team—we write the programs the ops team uses to do their job. GuyMac works primarily for the downlink group. He spent the day on a program called HiVali, which will be used by the downlink ops team to make sure a given HiRISE image accomplished its goal.

I work for the uplink group. I spent the day working on a program with the second greatest HiRISE software name: the HOGG. That’s the HiRISE Observation Generation GUI. The “the” is an important part of its name, by they way. You don’t use HOGG to generate HiRISE camera parameters. You use the HOGG.

A lot of our HiRISE tools have funny names; the most common way to name a piece of software here is to get a one-word description of its function and then add “Hi” to it. The planning software? HiPlan. The commanding software? HiCommand. The validation software? HiVali. The camera temperature modeler? HiTemp.

I like “the HOGG” for three reasons. One, who doesn’t like hearing their peers use such a ridiculous word to talk about something serious? Two, it breaks the HiRISE naming convention. And three? I get to correct people and point out that the “the” is part of the name. Still, it’s only my second favorite HiRISE software name. My favorite?

That’d be the HiRISE photometry predictor.

HIPHOP.

I’ll write more about these tools in the coming weeks.