It was fun to share some of the behind-the-scenes details with our followers! I thought it was pretty funny when Nick or I were too lazy to walk over to each others’ offices to ask a question, and asked each other over twitter instead. ha! I guess those questions probably give you a feel for the nitty-gritty of planning a cycle, anyway. I hope it was interesting! If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments.

If you missed it and want to read through the saga, I made an archive of tweets with the #hitwycle hashtag. (I didn’t start this until part-way through, though, so unfortunately the first few days of tweets are missing. Soon you can check the Library of Congress for them! ) You can see the whole archive here:

http://www.twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/hitwycle

Some of my favorites are below.

@nick_space Observation schedule passed to @laughingrid . Took her 5 minutes to find the first errors. Ho-hum. #hitwycle

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:46:45 +0000 – tweet id 10580054252 – #5

@laughingrid @nick_space That’s only because there’s an app for that. #hitwycle

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:02:44 +0000 – tweet id 10580649141 – #7

@nick_space Orbital mechanics guys do things precisely. Error in knowledge of where MRO is at start of cycle 89 =2 seconds along track. #hitwycle

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:51:56 +0000 – tweet id 10684333640 – #35

@laughingrid 9 public targets from #HiWish got scheduled! Some are even stereo! Your HiWish can come true, too! http://bit.ly/9Phhfb #hitwycle

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:15:46 +0000 – tweet id 10689737369 – #42

@laughingrid Fun fact: Our downlink rate from Mars->Earth is either 6 or 3 Mbps (megabits per sec), depending on the DSN station receiving. #hitwycle

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:09:48 +0000 – tweet id 10745661825 – #76

@nick_space Oh help!!! My HiTS has just walked out the door for the weekend. I’m on my own with this stuff. *shakes at knees* #hitwycle

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 00:39:43 +0000 – tweet id 10749117500 – #80

@nick_space Back to the grindstone. Going to go the whole HOGG today. #hitwycle

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 20:26:56 +0000 – tweet id 10788612411 – #86

@laughingrid @nick_space Bring home the bacon! #hitwycle

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 20:47:31 +0000 – tweet id 10789304081 – #87

@laughingrid Gold star to @nick_space for making my job easy! No major conflicts, good datavolume management, helpful notes, stuff makes sense. #hitwycle

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 03:44:46 +0000 – tweet id 10907883703 – #117

@nick_space .@laughingrid *smiles modestly and attempts to stop halo slipping over his eyes* #hitwycle

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 03:46:56 +0000 – tweet id 10907975462 – #118

@nick_space Check out where we have programmed new HiRISE images. Go to http://bit.ly/96icKS, Click: Search Suggested Targets, Click: Search #hitwycle

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:28:17 +0000 – tweet id 10922698369 – #120

@HiRISE (Hint for HiWishers!) @nick_space: @HiRISE doesn’t have enough targets in Hellas Basin. There’s some real cool stuff down there. #hitwycle

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:42:27 +0000 – tweet id 10940591066 – #133

@nick_space Hope the young student from the general public that asked for that image in Solis Planum has a big computer. Image will be 2 GB!! #hitwycle

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:14:12 +0000 – tweet id 10988935603 – #144

@laughingrid I said a HIPHOP the hippie the hippie to the hip hip hop, don’t stop, the rock it to the bang bang boogie up jumps the boogie #hitwycle

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:52:24 +0000 – tweet id 10992856514 – #146

@laughingrid So, natch: When the pimp’s in da club, drop it like it’s hot DROP IT LIKE IT’S HOT drop it like it’s hot #hitwycle or should I say hitwyzzle

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 22:19:58 +0000 – tweet id 11001410157 – #152

@nick_space Whoops! Software just exploded. Communication to the database wasn’t working. Oh well. Re-boot! #hitwycle

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 17:39:03 +0000 – tweet id 11045096803 – #161

@laughingrid Status: Commanding a spaceship! #hitwycle

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 17:57:17 +0000 – tweet id 11102052732 – #172

@nick_space Although I personally prefer spaceCRAFT. )) @laughingrid #hitwycle

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 18:46:48 +0000 – tweet id 11104178216 – #175

@laughingrid Person doing the safety check for me is the HiBUTS = HiRISE Backup Targeting Specialist. Don’t blame me for that one. #hitwycle

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 18:56:23 +0000 – tweet id 11104568119 – #178

@laughingrid 241 (!!!) observations’ command files sent to be radiated! They’ll go to Mars via the Deep Space Network. #hitwycle

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 21:14:53 +0000 – tweet id 11110152161 – #182

@HiRISE See next week’s planned images in Google Mars! http://bit.ly/cLDAVC Load this KML file in, will show footprints #hitwycle (via @laughingrid)

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 21:55:15 +0000 – tweet id 11111750083 – #184

@nick_space Looks like we have imaged a fresh impact site with HiRISE. Somewhere between Jan 05 and Feb. 10, a meteorite hit the surface. #hitwycle

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 18:12:10 +0000 – tweet id 11205809969 – #188

@nick_space Oh WOOOOWWWWW!!! First image from Hellas Basin region. THAT is going in a press release. Super choice by CTX team. #hitwycle

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 18:37:10 +0000 – tweet id 11206790843 – #190

@nick_space THAT @laughingrid IS DELETING MY OBSERVATIONS!!! RIOT! PROTEST! …… ok maybe not. That’s the way it is. Cos she’s the boss. #hitwycle

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:08:20 +0000 – tweet id 11275476112 – #199

@laughingrid To make @nick_space feel better… Also, this should totally be the theme song for Seasonal Change! #hitwycle ♫ http://blip.fm/~nsb5g

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:18:32 +0000 – tweet id 11275959488 – #200

@laughingrid LOL! a science team member’s justification for using bin1 (highest res): "High resolution RULES!" YEAH it does! +So does our team! #hitwycle

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 03:17:52 +0000 – tweet id 11287777550 – #201

@milkysa fundamental difference btwn science ops w/MRO, @CassiniSaturn: RT @laughingrid Oh well, it’s an orbiter – it’ll come around again! #hitwycle

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 15:43:56 +0000 – tweet id 11314236568 – #205

@elakdawalla Woo hoo! That’s #2 for me! RT @nick_space: Public suggestion from @elakdawalla is down [from Mars Recon Orbiter]. #hitwycle

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 03:51:11 +0000 – tweet id 11347490753 – #214

@nick_space Had a power outage here. The HiTS on cycle 90 has a deadline to make….. ooohhhhh getting tight. #hitwycle

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 19:44:30 +0000 – tweet id 11383455186 – #220

@laughingrid @nick_space Week 2 plan looked really boring, so I replaced all your images with night side calibrations. APRIL FOOLS #hitwycle

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 14:24:25 +0000 – tweet id 11426700682 – #224

@milkysa Time to make the final target file! (Sadly, no doughnuts) #hitwycle

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:15:09 +0000 – tweet id 11440267402 – #229

@HiRISE Load this KML file into Google Mars to see footprints of next week’s planned HiRISE observations: http://bit.ly/9C09m2 #hitwycle

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 21:23:14 +0000 – tweet id 11501136879 – #234

@nick_space .@laughingrid Yes. But it’s really worth it. Lovely image of fretted terrain in Protonilus Mensae just come down. #hitwycle

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 17:37:32 +0000 – tweet id 11709614663 – #244

@nick_space And there are no fretted guitars on Mars incidentally. #hitwycle

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 17:38:05 +0000 – tweet id 11709637963 – #245

@nick_space Cycle 89 has completed on MRO. The data is (ok "are") down on the ground and most has been processed. #hitwycle

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 22:17:46 +0000 – tweet id 12068892653 – #266

This blog entry describes it in much more detail, from when we tried to do this last fall. Unfortunately, that time the spacecraft went into safe mode, and we had to stop the experiment. Here’s hoping for better luck this time! :\

Cast of characters:

One difference is that this time the CIPP (@nick_space) is here in Tucson. So it’s pretty easy to walk over to his office and ask him a question. Despite that, we’ve actually had a few discussions over twitter instead. Talk about lazy!! The good side of that is that you get to follow the day-to-day planning and see what it’s really like to plan two weeks of HiRISE images!

Links:

We are going to try to Twitter a planning cycle for the HiRISE (http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu) experiment. The idea is to give people a feeling of all the work we have to do to get images from Mars out of a very special piece of equipment. Here are a couple of things you need to know to follow what is going on.

The scientist in charge of the scientific support for the cycle is called the CIPP. For cycle 75, that is @nick_space. Nick will be assisted by his Post-Doc., Anya, who is @mozhetbyt

The targeting specialist ensures that the plan produced can be implemented and keeps the CIPP from doing anything stupid. The targeting specialist is called the HiTS and for cycle 75 that is @laughingrid.

The HiRISE project has its own Twitter account (@HiRISE) which can also be followed.
We will try to use #hitwycle as a search hashtag for tweets.

We are attempting to run the cycle remotely. In the early stages of the mission, people had to travel to Tucson when they were CIPP. But now we can use special computers at our home institute. In this case, the CIPP is working from the University of Bern while the HiTS is sitting in Tucson, Arizona. This is the biggest time zone difference we have in the HiRISE project for this type of activity but it is not the only one. The HiTS interacts with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (JPL) and we have a lot of contact with the CRISM team (the infrared spectrometer system which is an instrument used to determine surface mineralogy) at the Applied Physics Lab of Johns Hopkins Uni on the US East Coast. They have their own web-site (http://crism.jhuapl.edu) which you can also look at.

We use a planning tool called HiPlan (developed by @HiCommander who is unfortunately on vacation this week) and entering targets into the system involves working with HiPlan. We have some short-cut names for things such as

• IO (interactive observation where we point the spacecraft at a specific target)
• NIO (non-interactive obs where we let the camera view an interesting area the spacecraft is already passing over)
• RA (ridealongs where CRISM or CTX asks the spacecraft to point and we take a look along with them)
• MHs (must-have are targets we really need to get this cycle – normally because of the lighting conditions)
• WTHs (wanna-have are targets which scientists need quickly to confirm a paper result or to fill in something they are really interested in)

We will talk sometimes about specific areas on Mars. You can follow that by using the Mars plug-in for Google Earth. It’s easy to download and run if you have a reasonably fast internet connection. (Google maps on Mars is also good if you can’t install a program: http://www.google.com/mars/) We will try to remember to send coordinates on Mars to help you find what we are looking at.

We will tweet when we can to tell you what is going on. I will try to answer questions you send about the planning process, what we are doing, and Mars science (if I can). Note that if there is a major incident (e.g. we find a dinosaur-bone or the spacecraft explodes) I will not be able to tweet that because items of that sort need to be officially released by NASA. These events are however very, very, unlikely.

The cycle plans two weeks of HiRISE operations and is split into week 1 and week 2. The planning process began on August 20th (although the first few days of the process are very light in terms of what’s going on). The cycle procedure actually lasts around 4 weeks in total because planning must be followed up by reviewing the results.

Please note that we can’t accept requests for images through Twitter right now, although we will be accepting public image requests in the near future (stay tuned!). Also I reserve the right to block you if you become a pain in the butt! (Examples of pain in the butt behavior are: constantly hassling me about the face on Mars, repeated tweets about aliens, discussions about whether we have actually been on the Moon, etc…..)

If you are a regular follower of @nick_space but not interested in this stuff, I will not complain/be upset/etc. if you stop following me for the next few weeks. After that though……

Hope you find it interesting.

@nick_space

UA job posting website

If you live in Tucson, you might be interested to know that we’re looking for a new HiRISE Targeting Specialist (HiTS) here at HiROC!

Our faithful blog readers are probably already familiar with some of what the HiTS do, but for the rest of you, here are some past entries related to different aspects of the job:

• Welcome, Newbies! – Training other new HiTS
• ESP so far – In the extended mission, things are (supposedly!) easier…
• How big are our feet? – Planning software HiTS use, HiPlan
• High data rate and HiTemp – Some of the challenges of planning images
• Looking Back – Special sequence commanding

I’ve found it to be an exciting and rewarding job, but it’s not an easy one. You need to be the type of person who thrives under pressure; can deal with firm deadlines, but is also creative and self-motivated in between deadlines; pays attention to small details, but can also “see the big picture” (so to speak ). You need to be able to communicate with, and translate between, people with diverse backgrounds and experience, from researchers on the science team to NASA engineers. Ideally, you’d have some relevant scientific background (planetary science, astronomy, or geology, for example), be familiar with UNIX and some programming, and most importantly, be excited about exploring Mars!

To view the complete job description, requirements, and apply online, click this link to the University of Arizona job listing. If you have any questions about the job, please leave them in the comments below!

The next cycle, however, will mark some changes in the way we do the planning process. This is cycle 58 (can you believe it’s been that many cycles since we started??). For most of that time, we’ve been doing things in much the same way. We’ve gotten so good at it that everyone decided they wanted to change everything & mess it all up. haha, just kidding. We’re actually trying to simplify things. Even though we’ve gotten pretty good at this, it’s still an incredibly complex process. We would like to continue doing it for a long time and still remain sane. Also, we expect that our funding will be cut in the future, and we want to make sure we can still do everything even if we have fewer people. Plus, things just wouldn’t feel right if we weren’t constantly changing something!

If you’re interested in the nitty-gritty details, here are some of the things we’re changing:

• We’re combining some deliveries – instead of choosing our “must-haves” (these are our top five highest-priority images each cycle) separately, we’re just putting them at the top of the big list we submit for the whole cycle. This means fewer files to create, check, and deliver, and – best of all – one less meeting (and it was a doozy of a meeting!).
• We’re giving up some autonomy by allowing the Cycle Coordinator (this is the person at JPL that combines all the teams’ input) to resolve conflicts between observations. This means we don’t have a chance to fix every problem ourselves, but we just have to trust them to do it right! This is going to save us an extra iteration of our target list – another thing we won’t have to create, tweak, check, re-check, and deliver every week.
• We’re simplifying the way we add “ride-along” observations (this is when we take an image at the same place & time as another instrument on MRO). Previously we did this by going back & forth between the operations person & the science team member (”CIPP”) – now we’re going to just go ahead & add a “placeholder” observation to go with every one of the other teams’ observations. Then when we hand everything over to the CIPP for planning detailed image parameters, they only plan the ones they want to keep. This should save a few steps of back-and-forth, and also allows the CIPP more time to consider all the possible ride-alongs.

We’re hoping all the changes go well!

On the main HiRISE site, we’ve posted a list of all the stereo pairs we’ve acquired & released. There are 467 of them! Now you can look up whether your favorite image is part of a stereo pair or not. (I don’t think the list is searchable yet, but it’s sorted by the observation ID of the first half.) There is also a PDF document on the page (click here to download directly) with more information about our stereo images. It includes instructions for using these stereo pairs to make your own red-blue anaglyphs (the ones you view with the 1950s 3-D glasses). To the right is one of those anaglyphs. This is part of a delta in Eberswalde Crater from the image PSP_001534_1560, linked on that page. (Search our catalog for ‘anaglyph’ to see even more.)

Wondering how we get stereo imaging?

It’s the same principle as seeing 3-D with your eyes: we need parallax to get the third dimension. To do this with only one “eye” (the HiRISE camera), we observe the same spot on Mars twice, from different directions. Usually the first half of the stereo pair is in a small off-nadir roll in one direction, and then the second half is taken on a larger roll in the other direction.

We can’t take two images at once, so we have to wait for the spot to be viewable twice – that can sometimes happen in the next two-week cycle, but usually it takes several cycles. Sometimes conflicts with other instruments or spacecraft activities prevent us from completing the stereo in enough time, and we have to “abandon” the first half. We’ve started calling those “left at the altar.” It’s very sad.

There’s a time limit on completing stereo because over time, the shadows change with the Sun’s seasonal movement. If the pattern of bright and dark material on the ground changes for any reason, the two halves of the stereo become impossible to correlate. For example, if a dust storm or a dust devil moves dust around, or if frost appears or disappears, the stereo is ruined. So once we take the first half of a stereo pair, the clock is ticking on completing it.

It would be wonderful if we could make every image a stereo observation, but we have to save these for our very highest-priority scientific goals. HiRISE will image less than 1% of the surface of Mars in the primary mission – so every image is precious! When we do stereo, we’re repeating coverage over the same ground. These stereo images have a very high scientific value to the team, but sometimes it’s still hard to think about trading that for an observation of another spot on Mars that has never before been imaged at high resolution. We have to make some tough decisions!

Unfortunately, we can’t just make them all the largest size the instrument is capable of taking, because our camera will get too hot. If it overheats, the instrument will shut itself off in order to prevent any damage to the electronics. So we have to be careful, and only plan images that won’t overheat HiRISE. In order to predict those temperatures, we use a tool called HiTemp (of course!). Here’s what it looks like (click on the image to see a bigger version).

This program reads in our planning files, and then models the temperatures of two key spots on the focal plane of the camera. It’s our job to make sure we don’t go above the dotted red line – this gives us a comfortable buffer below the scary solid red line. That’s when HiRISE would shut off, or safe. We know from experience by now that this is a big pain in the neck – a lot of work is required to get us back up & running, and we miss observations while we’re turned off. So we watch our HiTemp plots!

On the technical side, we’ve been working with the spacecraft engineers on this sequence for a while now. Any special activity like this requires a lot of hand-built commands, which have to be carefully reviewed and tested before we send them to MRO. We had to slew away from Mars, towards the Earth. Then we moved HiRISE’s focus mechanism a little, so we’d be in better focus to view the Earth & Moon. The spacecraft then slowly rotated so the Earth would pass through our field of view. Then it rewinded (rewound? ) & repeated the same thing, so we could take a second image that would be exposed correctly for the Moon, which is much darker. The focus mechanism was moved back to our perfect Mars focus, and then we resumed imaging Mars normally.

Due to the downlink outage I referred to in the previous post, we’ve had to scramble to protect these data. Many thanks to a certain prophetically-named Targeting Specialist for working so hard to cancel (and un-cancel) other images in order to make sure we get these down safely. After all this work, we really want to see the pictures! It won’t be for a while, though. We have to wait for the data to be downlinked and processed, which could take several days. Since these image are so different from our regular Mars images, our regular smooth pipelines are useless. Instead, everything has to be done by hand by our diligent downlink team. Fingers crossed until then!

UPDATE: This image has finally been released! http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/earthmoon.php The color processing had to be done by hand, and this just wasn’t as high of a priority as getting more Mars images, improving software, and preparing for our big PDS releases.

At this point, the storm is considered a “hemispherical event,” meaning it’s mainly affecting “only” half of the planet (the southern hemisphere, in this case). We have our fingers crossed that this will not expand and become a global event like the 2001 dust storm.

These storms, like weather on Earth, are difficult to predict, especially because they are relatively rare and we have much less information about them than we do about terrestrial weather. This is an opportunity to learn more about how the storms start and spread by gathering more data on the Martian dust and atmosphere. The CRISM instrument can measure the composition of the dust, for example, so we’ve helped them acquire extra images by canceling a number of our own images that would have been obstructed by the dust anyway. MARCI continues to take daily images of the globe, monitoring the storm’s activity.

While we wait to see what the dust does, our Targeting Specialists are scrambling to cancel observations and figure out where to take a chance and try imaging. Some areas are still relatively clear. We also have to deal with additional complications in our camera settings: even in areas where we can see the surface, the atmosphere is still dusty, so more light is reflected into the camera. We are learning how to adjust our instrument parameters to accommodate this, but without being able to predict where the dust will be, it’s very difficult!

Hopefully out of the chaos we’ll still get some good images. We will certainly learn more about operating our camera, and about Mars itself.

(Title is a quotation from Louisa May Alcott)

Also, our team is really growing!

You’ll notice a lot of new faces compared to a few years ago!

We spent the first day updating the team on our operations here at HiROC. Then for two days, almost everyone on the science team presented new results from recent HiRISE data, and explained their plans for future observing and analysis. We saw some really great images! A lot of people are doing “quick & dirty” three-dimensional analgyphs with our stereo data (like these), so we got to wear our red/blue glasses a lot. (We don’t have things calibrated & automated to the point where we can do this “correctly” yet, so these are still mostly preliminary, hand-processed products.)

Today, most of the team is participating in software training. Since we only have a day, we’re just doing short demos of the planning tools (HiPlan – see previous HiBlog entry for a recent update) and some of the analysis tools (like ISIS and IDL/ENVI)

For operations, it’s been wonderful to see the fruits of our efforts — we go to a lot of trouble to acquire an image, but once it’s acquired, we tend to lose track of it, because we’re planning the next images! Seeing the science that comes out of the data not only helps us understand strategies and be more intelligent in our targeting and planning, it’s also just really cool! I think keeping the “big picture” in mind is important in keeping us motivated and excited about what we’re doing.