I had the opportunity to attend the 40th annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. It’s being held here in Ithaca, NY at Cornell University. Along with some beautiful fall weather, I’ve also enjoyed some fantastic science. The meeting started with the Mars sessions on the first day. I think every single talk about the planet’s surface used HiRISE data! An entire session was devoted to the Martian atmosphere, which was interesting because I’m not as familiar with that. It’s also been great to see what’s going on in the rest of the solar system – I’ve been pretty Mars-oriented since starting with HiRISE, so I’ve loved hearing about things like the lakes on Titan, progress in exoplanet studies, and changes in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

As usual, other blogs are covering the meeting well (Planetary Society and the Martian Chronicles, for example). In addition, the sessions are all being web-streamed live (links to streaming video here; full program here). I think this afternoon’s special sessions are going to be really interesting, so I recommend watching them. I’m especially interested in the mission highlights from the rovers, Phoenix, MESSENGER, Cassini, and Kaguya. We’ve already seen some results from Kaguya and MESSENGER in the individual sessions – exciting stuff!

Yesterday morning we turned the MRO spacecraft around to see our point of origin – the Earth. We took a special calibration image of the Earth and Moon. HiRISE isn’t the first to take a picture of the Earth from Mars, but we’re hoping ours will be even more detailed. We expect the Earth to be about 90 pixels across its diameter, and the Moon about 24 pixels. So it won’t be a big beautiful clear image like you’re used to looking at from our weekly releases, but we should be able to resolve features like continents!

This diagram simulates of what the inner solar system would look like if it were being viewed from above right now. MRO is looking from Mars (orange) towards Earth (purple). You can see from this geometry that we’ll only see the sunlit part of the Earth and Moon as a crescent. They’ll look somewhat less than half full.

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