Join us this Sunday, May 25th from 3-8 PM on the University of Arizona campus for a celebration of the landing of our sister mission, Phoenix. The Kuiper building, Sonett lobby, (that’s where HiROC is located, and where we’ll be) and Flandrau planetarium will be open to the public. There will be speakers from the Phoenix and HiRISE teams, children’s activities, NASA TV running for live updates on the status of the lander, telescopes set up for viewing the sun, tours of the buildings, planetarium shows, and cake!

Detailed schedule of events:
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/calendar/calendar.php?ID=107

We’ll be thinking of the Phoenix team during this critical step – we’ve got our fingers crossed, wishing you the best!

It seems like we’ve been preparing for the Phoenix mission for such a long time – and now it’s finally close to landing day! T-6 days according to our countdown clock! Things are getting pretty crazy here, and I thought a little overview of how the HiRISE team is supporting the Phoenix mission would be useful.

We’ve been imaging the northern plains for Phoenix since we started our mission (here’s a bunch of reconnaissance images on our website). The first images we got back showed lots of scary boulders (a close-up of one of our Transition images shown to the right), so we sampled other areas and searched for a relatively boulder-free landing spot. The area the Phoenix team finally chose is being called the “Green Valley“, not because of the “green light = safe to go” connotation, but rather because some geological maps made of the area happened to use green as the color for the valley. Perhaps coincidentally, Green Valley is also a town near Tucson, where both Phoenix and HiRISE are based. Whatever the reason, I like that the name has a lovely calm, comforting feel.

Once the Phoenix team picked out their landing site, we worked on a high-resolution mosaic of the entire 3-sigma landing ellipse (”3-sigma” means there is a 99% probability it will land within this area; see this great blog entry on landing ellipses at the Planetary Society). The Phoenix landing ellipse is shown to the left, along with the footprints of a number of HiRISE images. (This was before we were quite done with the mosaic.) These images have helped the Phoenix team characterize the regional geology and assess the safety of the landing site.

In addition to scouting landing sites, we’re also going to be involved with Phoenix during its prime mission on the ground. We’ve been planning and practicing several different ways of cooperating: (more…)

On this NPR Science Friday episode, HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen and M.I.T. planetary geophysicist Maria Zuber discuss new results that illuminate the story of water on Mars with host Ira Flatow.

Also, available free on iTunes, are a collection of videos from the Phoenix Mission’s Open House, highlighting the University of Arizona’s Mars-related projects including UofA speakers McEwen, Phoenix P.I. Peter Smith, GRS and TEGA P.I. William Boynton, and planetary geologist Vic Baker.

Finally, during last week’s UofA football game, our marching band played a tribute to Mars and in particular Phoenix with a little ditty written by band director Jay Rees. I don’t know if a recording of the performance is available online, but here’s a snippet of the song:

“Follow the water” is NASA’s song,
UA’s happy to sing along.
We shall see what we shall see.
We might find biology!

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!

Today’s release includes thirty-five images—a large number of presents under the tree, so to speak. But they’re wrapped in plain paper from the recycle bin… the bows and ribbons and glossy glitzy wrap of captions, cut-out images and color processing are absent.

Further, many of these are samples of the Northern Plains (reconnaissance for the Phoenix Mars Lander) which are very flat and featureless. To continue the X-mas gift metaphor, they are the HiRISE equivalent of tube socks.

But there are some real gems in there, mind-boggling terrain. Given the fairly small size of the HiRISE science team and their busy schedules, I would guess that members of the public have a good chance of being the first human to really look closely at the highest resolution of these corners of the Mars.

Well, it’s been a while since we’ve been posting a lot, so I thought I’d just give you guys some kind of an idea as to what we’re doing these days.

The uplink team is constantly looking where to point the camera next. There is a program which is in beta testing now called HiWeb which allows scientists and other people to input suggestions. The Uplink team reviews the suggestions in the database, assigns a priority to each of these suggestions, and then finds when we can point the camera at the part. They also make sure a certain percentage of the upcoming pictures are assigned to look for a Phoenix landing spot, as this is a high priority item at the moment. They are still learning exactly how to best command the camera, and are constantly sharpening their skills.

The downlink team is making sure operations run smoothly at HiROC. They are verifying that the processing has taken place, make sure that the images have been calibrated correctly, that there are no image processing artifacts on the images we are about to release. If there is any artifacts created from processing the image, the source of the problem is identified and fixed, and then the image is reprocessed. While previously we have sent images to the public that had some small processing artifacts during the post-MOI and Transition imaging, we currently are waiting until the images have been completely validated. The downlink team is also taking a quick look at each image that comes down, and making sure there isn’t something unexpected, for example, haze at Mars, lots of saturated pixels, etc. If any such problems are found, they notify the uplink team, to ensure that we don’t have continuing problems. These problems are very rare, but on occasion happen, due to the changing nature of Mars. (more…)

The 9 new images released yesterday are now also available with the Zoomify Flash applet.

This includes the first high resolution look near a candidate landing site for the Phoenix Mars Scout mission, which launches next year.

This is currently the best way for the ordinary computer user to get a good look at the detail in our images.

Stay tuned for more in the next few days!