It’s summer again in the southern hemisphere of Mars, so we’re continuing our mosaic of the landing ellipse for the lost Mars Polar Lander. ESP_013368_1035 was the first of the new images to be released, and we’ve gotten a lot of people asking where to send their candidates. You can either contact us directly, or add to the comments in our previous blog post about the search.

The Unmanned Spaceflight forums have a long discussion on the previous search efforts. Many candidates were proposed, and the community’s discussion about them is quite enlightening.

Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society also started a coordinated search effort last year. I don’t know if that effort is still ongoing, but her page on how to use HiRISE images in the search is still a great resource. It includes examples of known hardware, cosmic ray hits and other artifacts, and more tips on searching.

In addition to the list of images on the previous blog entry, these new images have been released: (we’ll try to keep this list up to date as more are released)

• ESP_013368_1035
• ESP_013078_1030
• ESP_013223_1025
• ESP_013289_1035
• ESP_013566_1025
• ESP_013500_1035
• ESP_013711_1030
• ESP_013724_1030
• ESP_013935_1030
• ESP_013790_1035
• ESP_014001_1040
• ESP_014080_1040

Thanks for all your interest, and good luck searching!

9/2/09: ETA new images released in September PDS release.

In our last PDS release, HiRISE made available our images (to date) of an area where the Mars Polar Lander is suspected to have crashed in 1999. MPL was the first mission to the high latitudes of Mars, but failed mysteriously, the first [Correction: second] of two high-profile failures in America’s Mars program at the time. An assessment team found a number of potential causes of the crash; the condition of MPL, if found, may help to resolve what actually happened.

There is a large area covered at high resolution in these images. I think some of our team members have looked over the images but they have not found a trace of MPL. You may in fact be the first person to see MPL in the nearly ten years since it left Earth.

In the wake of MPL, NASA canceled a planned 2001 lander. The University of Arizona, which had a significant presence in both missions, proposed the Phoenix Mars Scout mission, “rising from the ashes” of these missions. Phoenix, as you might expect, it said to be very thoroughly tested. On 2008 May 25th, Phoenix will be landing in the high northern latitudes (above the equivalent of the Arctic Circle on Earth).

In this PDF document graciously provided by Tim Parker, you can see what various types of hardware look like to HiRISE. It also shows examples of cosmic-ray hits in order to distinguish them from real space junk.

Here are links to our web pages providing information and downloads for our images of the MPL site.

• PSP_002846_1040
• PSP_003690_1035
• PSP_004336_1035
• PSP_004402_1030
• PSP_004824_1030
• PSP_004969_1035
• PSP_005035_1030
• PSP_005114_1035
• PSP_005180_1035
• PSP_005325_1035
• PSP_005391_1030
• PSP_005470_1035
• PSP_005536_1030
• PSP_005602_1035
• PSP_005747_1035
• PSP_005813_1030
• PSP_005892_1025
• PSP_005958_1025

Have you SEEN the new website yet???

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/

If not, why are you reading this? Go look at it! It’s beautiful!

Besides the cool new look that shows off our beautiful images so nicely, the new website redesign also has some fun AND super-useful new features: a searchable catalog of released images, illustrated explanations of all of our science themes, HiRISE “To Go” for mobile devices, & more.

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!