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!

On Friday, HiRISE released over 1200 color observations. This was our first large release of the color products (not counting the 140+ images of MSL candidate sites released back in October). I was asked recently if our images look fairly similar to one another, or if they are all completely different. Well, you can now judge that for yourselves, but I feel the answer clearly tends toward the latter. The variety of terrain types on Mars is wider than you might have expected, and everywhere you look you’ll find something spectacular.

But I’d like to showcase one image in particular. Within this single image, there is a remarkable progression of landforms, in a view running down a small portion in the interior of Valles Marineris, the “Grand Canyon of Mars.” Here are a selected set of sub-images from the RGB color product; each thumbnail links to a larger view. All of the original products are available at our website.

At the top of the image is a flat, cratered plain, very much what one thinks of as typically Martian. The edge is abrupt, leading immediately to a steep descent crossing multiple layers of bedrock. The accumulating aprons of debris are channeled down between rocky ridges.

A number of boulder tracks are visible, remnants of mighty tumbles. You can follow one of these tracks for something like a kilometer down into the middle portion of the image. Here is a small part of this track.

Farther down, a network of scalloped terrain has formed in what must be a transition zone from the upper, steeper section and the lower, flatter step. What’s interesting to me about this section is, as shown in the image below, the scalloped edges form a stunning pattern of bifurcation.

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Starting with the 10/10 release, color images are included for the first time. We’ll describe how we process these in the days and weeks to come. But what I’d like to do first is give a brief description of all our product types as they currently are available. You’ve no doubt noticed a mind-boggling array of new options on our product pages. They now include what we call our “NOMAP” products; NOMAP means that they are not map-projected. In other words, not rotated to the direction of north, not mapped to a coordinate system, and not scaled to any particular geometric resolution.

I’ve prepared this ugly table that outlines each of the products now available (excluding the raw EDRs). So reading the columns from left to right: there are three types of “NOMAP” products, two types of lossy “QLOOK” (Quicklook) RDRs, and two types of lossless RDRs.

HiRISE Products	“NOMAP”	RDR
		“QLOOK”
Grayscale	RED	RED	RED
Color	RGB	COLOR	COLOR
	IRB
JP2	Lossy		Lossless

With that as a reference, now I’ll try to define everything more precisely.

“NOMAP”

Non map-projected product. Always lossy compressed for smaller size and quicker viewing. These are not formal Planetary Data System products; they’re “special”, meaning there is no PDS label and no Software Interface Specification describing them. Available for IRB, RGB and RED.

RDR

Reduced Data Record: reduced in the sense of refined or processed, not raw data. Formal PDS products with accompanying labels and a detailed SIS document describing their format and processing steps. Available both in lossless and quicklook formats for both RED & COLOR.

“QLOOK”

Quicklook: a special product that is a lossy compressed version of the RDR. In a normal RDR, all of the original data is retained. But with a quicklook, some of the highest resolution detail is discarded to make for quicker viewing.

RED

The image obtained by the red-filtered CCDs. It will be over the full swath width, typically data from all ten red CCDs. Covers the visible wavelength band from 550 to 850 nanometers.

IR

Infrared. Covers the near-IR wavelengths from 800-1000 nanometers.

BG

Blue-Green, visible wavelengths from 400-600 nm.

COLOR

A color RDR. It contains data from the IR, BG and center RED ccds. Typically this will be a skinny strip (”center swath”) inside a skinny strip, or as I like to say, the bacon-strip effect.

IRB

An enhanced color NOMAP. It has the same color bands as the RDR: IR, RED and BG.

RGB

An enhanced color NOMAP. It contains only data from the RED and BG. The blue is derived from the difference between the RED and BG. The color bands are RED, BG and the synthetic blue.

EDR

Experiment Data Record, a formal PDS product that is raw uncompressed data with a label header.

Note: we will be working towards making all of these products available for all prior releases.

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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Spacecraft missions are complicated endeavors that result in a wealth of scientific and engineering data. Long after the mission has ended, these data can be extremely useful for later study and discovery. With so many missions over so many years, how can later generations find and make use of these data?

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!

(I originally posted this on another blog on Wednesday, April 11. It is also appropriate here.)

Once upon a time Richard Hoagland was my role model and Carl Sagan was not. While Sagan was a media hog, Hoagland fought the good fight against the government conspiracy that hid evidence of alien intelligences and the artifacts left throughout the solar system by an ancient alien civilization.

There was, after all, the “Face”.

During college, I overdosed on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. I left pseudoscience behind. I saw Hoagland for the charlatan he really was (and is), and I came to appreciate Sagan for his reason, his passion, and his inspiring desire to educate.

Now, years later I work for HiRISE, participating in an experiment to photograph the surface of Mars using a high resolution camera. We had to take yet another image of the Cydonia region on Mars, because of the history, because of the public interest, because of the desire to leave silliness behind and instead embrace the wonder of reality.

Today the image was released (see the various image options, including the highest resolution JPEG2000 version), along with other gorgeous views of the Martian surface.

This then is the real face of Mars, a boulder-strewn mesa carved not by imaginary entities but by the slow yet steady erosion caused by winds, impacts, physical failure of rocks, and perhaps temperature variations.

I think that while I believed in the “Face” I could not have had the dream job I do today. I would not know the joy I know today, the joy that comes from seeing Mars not as I use to want it to be, but Mars as it really is. This is the real Mars, far more exciting and full of wonder and mystery than Hoagland’s fantasy version.

If a dedication means anything at all, then I dedicate this post to Carl Sagan, a person I did not appreciate while he was alive, but who has taught me so much through the legacy of his words. I now look at Mars with “skeptical thinking and an aptitude for wonder,” the two skills he highlighted in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.

Tuvas posted this great top-ten list over on Unmanned Spaceflight.

I changed it around a bit, hope you don’t mind, T!

1. You consider any image with less than a billion pixels a mere pittance… a negligible amount of data.
2. You realize that any part of Mars can be interesting, if viewed at sufficiently high resolution.
3. You start to see in black and white away from the “Center strip” of your eyes.
4. You have decided to buy a 500 Gigabyte drive just to store a few dozen of your favorite HiRISE Images.
5. You’re considering getting a new 40″ LCD mainly to look at HiRISE Images.
6. You know what JPEG 2000 is.
7. You start making up new Hi Names (HiStuff, HiSpace, etc, etc).
8. You continually refresh the web page starting Wednesday morning, waiting for the next release.
9. When using Google Earth, you wish you could zoom in further, just like HiRISE can.
10. You’re reading this!

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.

I thought I’d offer a few more words as to what is done with images at HiROC. Validation has been mentioned in the blog, and I’d like to explain a bit more about that. I’ve been involved in writing the primary validation tool, HiVali, and I will be the primary student validator for the next month. (The regular student validators are from out of state, and are going home for the Christmas holidays. I’m from around here, and offered my services to look at pretty pictures from Mars all day;-))

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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…)