I want to point out this awesome new feature on our website. This week’s captioned releases were accompanied by a really cool movie. It scrolls over some areas of the images in high resolution. It’s a nice way to cruise around the observations, and I love how it shows off the color. This might be an easier way to quickly browse the images for people who don’t use the IAS Viewer.

The movie might be a little hard to find; if you click on the “Updated: 19 March 2008″ link in the upper right of our main page, it will take you to this page, which shows this week’s releases. There, in the lower right corner, there are links to the scroll clip. It’s available in Quicktime, an “AppleTV” format (which plays for me in iTunes), and a smaller one for your iPhone. There’s even a groovy soundtrack! Thanks to our masterful webmaster who put this together. Let us know how you like it!

Three HiRISE papers are coming out in a special issue of the journal Science today. Our science team has been working hard on analyzing the images we take, and they’ve discovered some interesting things.

One paper talks about a few aspects of the history of water on Mars: HiRISE images of “rock glaciers” and bright deposits in gullies that might be extremely recent. HiRISE observations of an area called Athabasca Valles were used to show that it is actually covered with a thin veneer of lava. A third paper discusses thin layers in the North Polar cap. HiRISE is able to discern very fine layering (seen in an excerpt of image PSP_001636_2760 at left), as well as the color and thickness of each layer. Since these layers were laid down over hundreds of thousands of years of Martian history, they provide a record of climate change on the planet.

You can find a lot of things on the HiRISE website that are impossible to include in a print journal – like full-resolution color versions of the images from the papers, and (my favorite) cool 3-D flyover movies of the stereo observations. Our webmaster designed this lovely page for accessing these special products. Have fun flying over Mars!

Tomorrow is the first launch opportunity for our sister mission, Phoenix. We don’t have a lot of day-to-day interaction with the Phoenix project, because their building is located a ways off-campus. It’s hard not to feel some camaraderie with them, though. Not only did HiRISE image a lot of possible landing sites, the mission is based right here in our department at the U of A.

If you aren’t super-excited about Phoenix yet, just try and not get excited by this awesome trailer they put together! (Alternate formats are available here, and on youtube, of course.) I was completely enthralled. It’s got everything — action, suspense, an emotional back-story, a totally Hollywood time-lapse mega-zoom to a night launch scene, and a rockin’ soundtrack!

The whole Phoenix website is fabulous, too, if you haven’t seen it yet.

Launches are risky times, and we’re all nervous and excited for Phoenix. All our best wishes go with it as it leaves this planet!

There are a few PSP image releases for everyone today.

• Spirit
• Viking 1 Lander
• Viking 2 Lander

Also, a couple of special products:

• Victoria Crater in 3-D
• Opportunity movie

Enjoy!