Last week we had a rare event: HiRISE turned off! We call this safe mode, because it’s a safety measure built into the instrument’s software. Whenever any of the sensors starts going out of bounds, like temperatures or voltages, the instrument powers down to prevent damage to the electronics. In this case, one temperature sensor went over its upper limit of 35 degrees Celsius. It’s pretty disconcerting when something unexpected like this happens, but at least we know the instrument is protected.

We had the difficult detective job of figuring out what went wrong. It was clear early on that the instrument overheated, but we couldn’t figure out why. Our tool that predicts the temperatures (”HiTemp”) didn’t predict anything that hot. We didn’t take a really large image, which would heat us up (at least, nothing bigger than normal! ). The local operations team worked with the health & safety people, the spacecraft engineers at LMA, and some of the software developers at Ball Aerospace that originally designed HiRISE. Together we all investigated the problem.

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Here we are over two weeks into PSP, and we haven’t even finished releasing our TRA images!

Actually, today we got 31 TRA images out the door, just about completing that set. In addition, the previous 32 grayscale images have been reprocessed with our improved geometry—no more jagged edges on the reprojected “Red Mosaics”.

Furthermore, the full-res images are now available as lossless JPEG-2000 (JP2) files. At HiROC we are using the ExpressView application from a company called LizardTech… a subsidiary of some Japanese company (that has no affiliation to us FWIW).

ExpressView is available for Mac and Windows. Their download page describes it only as a browser plug-in, but the installer contains an application as well.

ExpressView provides progressive rendering (though you still have to have the entire file first—we are considering moving to a streaming model using the JPIP protocol but there are even fewer clients available). It should also reduce the amount of memory (RAM) needed to view our largest images.

There are a few options available to Linux users, but nothing we have tried is as fast or as feature-rich. In any case, let us know what works or doesn’t work for you.

All of these images are available at the usual location.

A system for streamlining the process of editing captions, highlighting cut-out areas and pushing out web pages is in the works. We will get caught up.

In the meantime, look for the first set of PSP releases by this time next week.

P.S. Happy Thanksgiving.