The Martian Chronicles has two great articles about presentations given by HiRISE Team Members: Spiders on Mars, from our Deputy PI Candice Hansen (more about this topic here, under “Spring at the South Pole of Mars”); and Layers and Swiss Cheese, which mentions two HiRISE people, Kathryn Fishbaugh and Shane Byrne. The polar group has been very active in helping to plan and target images, and their results are really cool (ha, ha!).

Star Stryder has also been at LPSC, with lots of stories through the week. The post Pingos, Polygons and other Puzzles mentions two types of Martian landforms I know members of our team are studying in HiRISE images, although there aren’t many specifics about their LPSC presentations. For some visuals to go along with the story, here are some HiRISE images of possible pingos and plentiful polygons.

I also thought their reports on speeches by the NASA bigwigs were very interesting: NASA Administrator Mike Griffin telling young scientists not to specialize in the face of changing funding priorities, and Alan Stern discussing possible MSL delays.

So, check out these reports, and if you see any other good ones, add a link below in the comments! Hopefully we’ll get more as the week progresses.

A team of scientists at the United States Geological Survey used two HiRISE stereo images to create a very high-resolution topography model of the crater that contains one of the bright deposits. Our team at UA used this model to examine whether the bright deposit in the Centauri region is more likely formed by a water-rich or a completely dry flow. Our results show that a completely dry flow could explain the deposit’s location and shape. Since it is very difficult to produce liquid water on the surface of Mars today, our work suggests that this bright deposit was formed without water. This does not mean that the gully that the deposit is in formed without water or that water never existed on the martian surface. Our work is just relevant to the recent bright deposit we studied.

HiRISE images show similar bright deposits around Mars. I am studying these deposits to look for one that cannot be explained by a dry flow alone. Finding one would mean that liquid water might be reaching the surface today, which could help NASA figure out where to look for past and present life on Mars!

The solution for many NASA missions has been the development of the centralized Planetary Data System (PDS). The PDS is several things: a collection of websites, a search capability, an archive, a database, a learning tool, etc. The PDS Imaging Node is located at http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/ and acts as “the curator of NASA’s primary digital image collections from past, present and future planetary missions.” These missions include Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, and many more. Now the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been added to the list, with the HiRISE team releasing our first several months of image data.

• MRO PDS page: http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/Missions/MRO_mission.html
• MRO Product Search page: http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/search/index.jsp
• HiRISE Volume: http://hirise-pds.lpl.arizona.edu/PDS/

What we have released is an archive of the HiRISE Experiment Data Records (EDRs) and Reduced Data Records (RDRs). EDRs are in the *.IMG file format and represent individual CCD channels (remember, there are 14 CCDs in the HiRISE camera and two channels per CCD, for a total of 28 channels). These EDRs are cleaned up, calibrated, stitched together, and mapped to Mars’ geometry, resulting in the RDR products. RDRs are in the *.JP2 and *.LBL formats. JPEG2000 is the technology that enables us to offer our gigantic images to the scientific community and the public in a timely and efficient manner. An observation’s image data are in the *.JP2 file and its meta data are in the detached *.LBL files. To view these products, JPEG2000 compatible software is required (see our site for a list of offerings).

While we have been trying to release up to five captioned images a week for the past few months, the PDS release represents several hundred images, most of them without captions. You can find them using the PDS search capabilities, and you can also find them on the new HiRISE site, unveiled today to coincide with this first PDS release. The redesigned site focuses on the images while providing, hopefully, a more user-friendly interface:

• HiRISE Site: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/
• “About Our Redesign”: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/profil.php
• Images released to the PDS: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/pds_release.php

As word gets out about the new site and the PDS release, you may experience some site slowness. Please be patient, and thank you for your interest!