We were pleased to welcome Linda Ronstadt (!!!) to the HiRISE Operations Center last week. We gave her and a few of her friends & family a presentation about the HiRISE mission, and we showed them some of our images in false color, 3-D and on the HiWall. Linda was incredibly nice and enthusiastic, and she had lots of great questions for us. Turns out rock stars love HiRISE! At least, we hope she enjoyed it as much as we did!

Lately I’ve been helping out with the tours that we give of our operations center (HiROC) lobby and some public talks. Depending on the audience, we usually tell them a little bit about the HiRISE camera, its capabilities, and the MRO mission in general. We also talk about what we personally do at the operations center. The full-scale model of the camera and the “HiWall” are really nice exhibits for visitors. The highlight is usually when we show off what HiRISE has accomplished: color images, 3-D anaglyphs (everyone likes wearing those glasses!), and the recent addition of the fly-through movies has been very popular.

My favorite part is when people have questions for us – even when I don’t know the answers. Because, honestly, that’s what science is – we don’t always have the answers, but that’s what makes it exciting! It’s also fun to find out which aspects of the mission inspire other people, and I get a different perspective on what they think is interesting (versus just what I think is interesting!). Some of the questions are really good, too! We were talking with some middle-school students from El Paso, Texas, and their questions were so astute. One girl asked, “Does Mars have plate tectonics?” Another good question was, “How do we know about the interior of Mars?” These are great questions, and HiRISE is helping scientists to answer these and other questions, along with data from many other instruments studying Mars.

In case you were curious about these particular questions, like these kids were, here are some short answers and references for more information:
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Just as a follow up to the previous posts, here’s a picture of our Department Head, modified to appear to be taken from HiRISE, put on the HiWall for an April Fool’s Joke. This image has been shrunk, but otherwise is the same as the image that appeared on the HiWall.

On Monday morning, I started up HiPlan, our image planning and targeting tool (see this post for more about HiPlan), and this unexpected window popped up:

My first pre-coffee reaction was to panic, but then I read it more closely and realized what day it was. Turns out the HiCommander had snuck some “special” updates into a recent release of HiPlan.

The HiWall was also displaying a certain department head’s “face on Mars” all day.

In the building we are located, there is a lobby on the ground floor. Along with most of the first set of pictures we took, there is a full scale model of the HiRISE camera, along with the HiWall, a 3×5 wall of moniters, each of which is 1600×1200 pixels, which displays some of the pictures in super high resolution, 4800×6000 pixels total.

The picture being shown currently is the part of the first image we have currently received. We still haven’t received the entire image, it is coming in soon.