Many people ask us if we are still imaging the Phoenix lander, and the answer is yes, as long as there is enough light. Here is our latest view of the landing site, acquired December 21, 2008. Conditions are hazy and dark because as the season approaches northern winter on Mars, the sun does not rise as high in the sky. Looks cold!
The latest, and most massive, release of HiRISE image data to the Planetary Data System includes such gems as the previously mentioned “Caught in Action: Avalanches on North Polar Scarps (PSP_007338_2640)” and “The Earth & Moon as Seen from Mars (PSP_005558_9040 and PSP_005558_9045)“.
How much data was released? 2422 observations, making up 9.9 terabytes “in over 225,599 standard PDS and extras products” according to our database specialist. This was for data between orbit ranges 4400 and 6999, or between July 05, 2007 and January 23, 2008 (which is a lot of loops around the Red Planet!)
We have now released a total of 16.8 TB worth of data, or nearly 500,000 image products. Please check out the latest images on the HiRISE website on the “March 2008: New HiRISE Images Released to the Planetary Data System” page.
These data have been processed, and reprocessed when necessary, with the latest automated pipelines on our production processing cluster. We continue to make changes to the software, however, and will have to reprocess all of these data yet again in a few months. What you see today is gorgeous and as complete as currently possible, but we always want to tweak our calibration, color, and geometry pipelines to make these even better.
This release places us very far ahead of the MRO project’s expectations for the HiRISE team. We are now working on speeding up our releases even more, so that they occur more often. That means we will probably never have such a large release again, which, as far as us downlink folks are concerned is a very good thing. Making sure 9.9 terabytes of data is ready to release is hard work. The images and new findings make it worth it, though!
