The HiRISE team met up this summer in Whitefish, Montana. In between meetings, we were also able to take several geologic field trips and hikes. Glacier National Park has many cool (haha) glacial features, of course, and we also learned about some interesting sedimentology that occurred in the ancient geologic past. The patterns we saw in the sedimentary rocks are similar to those discovered by the Mars Opportunity Rover – cross-bedding and festooned ripples that form when sand is laid down under a body of water. The shape and direction of the ripples can tell you how much water was present, how fast it was flowing, and whether it was a river, a lake, or an ocean. These are important questions we’d like to answer about the history of water on Mars.

The park also has wonderful examples of glacial geology. HiRISE has taken images of many features thought to be related to glaciers, so it’s important to understand the terrestrial analogs that lead scientists to think these are evidence of flowing ice on Mars. For example, we hiked along a moraine composed of jumbled rocks the Grinnell Glacier left behind as it flowed downhill. In addition to the remains of the (rapidly disappearing) glacier itself, we also saw typical glacial erosional structures such as U-shaped valleys, hanging valleys, and cirques. For a HiRISE image of cirque-like features, see PSP_005730_1405.

On one of our field trips, we were accompanied by reporter Michael Jamison of The Missoulian. This story was on the front page of the paper the following day:

I thought the story was really good – a quirky (but so are we!) description of why we would want to stare at the rocks in such a magnificent setting, and their relevance to our mission to Mars. We all thought it was funny when he called Alfred McEwen, our Principle Investigator, a “Marsman”!

HiRISE Team in Glacier National Park, in front of a classic U-shaped valley carved by glacial erosion.

We’re in the midst of another HiRISE team meeting here in Tucson. I can’t believe it’s been almost two years since the team meeting I blogged about here. There are a few new faces, but mostly familiar friends that we’ve worked with for years by now. Our two newest Targeting Specialists are meeting the science team for the first time. (They’re actually not that “new” any more – they started last June, but this is their first team meeting.) Some of the other new folks are students and post-docs who are working on interesting research projects using HiRISE data. There are also a few people from JPL here at the meeting, who we talk to on the phone and email often, but we’ve never actually met face-to-face before.

Today during the meeting we are getting updates on all the Science Themes. Our images are divided into groups according to the geologic process that we hypothesize occurred. For each of these themes, a Science Theme Lead is assigned. These “STLs” are Co-Investigators or postdocs who are experts in that area. For example, the Volcanic Processes theme contains images intended to explore phenomena related to volcanism, such as inflated lavas, water-lava interactions, volcanic pits and cones, and mysterious types of collapse features such as the one shown in the anaglyph to the left. As you can read in the caption for that image, we’re still not sure how this feature formed. There are several different possibilities. The image was originally placed in the Impact Processes theme because that was one hypothesis. However, after seeing the high resolution image and stereo data from HiRISE, formation by a meteor impact doesn’t seem as plausible. Collapse after loss of material beneath the surface, such as magma or water, is a better fit to our observations.

A number of our science team members are at LPSC, the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, this week. This is a big gathering in Houston, Texas, where members of the planetary science community share their work from over the last year. Unfortunately, we don’t have an active blogger there, but I wanted to point out some other people sending out excellent reports about HiRISE science.

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.

Today a press release went out about a forthcoming paper in the journal Geology (click here for full text online or here to download a PDF). John Grant, a Co-Investigator on the HiRISE science team, is the lead author, and most of the co-authors are also on our science team.

What is a megabreccia? A breccia is a jumbled-up mixture of broken rocks, cemented together by a finer-grained material. We see them in impact craters and volcanoes on the Earth, places where there was a lot of violent energy to break up rocks. A megabreccia is just a larger version of that – something we can see with HiRISE resolution, as opposed to something you’d have to pick up in your hand to identify. The megabreccia in Holden formed when the explosion that opened the crater shattered rocks, mixed them up, and then the fragmented ejecta collapsed back down into the crater. Before HiRISE, we didn’t have the resolution to detect these textures.

This is a cutout of an image taken in Holden Crater, showing the megabreccia texture, in false color as usual. A context map is shown to the right, showing where in the crater rim this image is located (click these images to enlarge). The blocks here are mostly darker, and they’re embedded in a lighter-toned material. The dark chunks are kind of “scooped out,” which means they’re more easily eroded than the surrounding light-colored rock. Scientists think this may be because they’re sedimentary rocks, formed at the bottom of a lake or river. The stripey dark blobs on top are sand dunes that are slowly covering up the area again.

This megabreccia is located in an area scientists find fascinating for other reasons, too: there are clays that were laid down over a long period of time when it had to be wet. This implies there was once a lake in this crater – perhaps more than once over its history. At one point, the lake broke through the rim of the crater, releasing a huge flood of liquid water. You can see the channel this formed in the context map above. This flood eroded away material that was covering the megabreccia, exposing it for HiRISE to see.

The HiRISE image PSP_003077_1530 shows another part of Holden Crater, and the caption includes more information about the geologic history of the area.

We’re just finishing up four days of having the whole HiRISE team visiting us here in Tucson. It’s been a great team meeting! We had updates on operations, and heard a lot about science results from HiRISE images. Some CRISM and THEMIS team members participated, too, so we got to see what other teams are doing and talk about collaborating and using multiple data sets. People are doing really exciting things with HiRISE data!

Also, our team is really growing!

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

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It seems that things are (dare I say?) settling down into a routine here at HiROC. As the cycles progress, we get a little better with each one: software tools are being developed, our procedures are being refined, and we’re becoming more adept and making fewer mistakes (hopefully!). Of course, there are always little interruptions and semi-emergencies that preclude relaxing too much.
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At about 11:34 UTC, DSN received a transmission from MRO that HiRISE was successfully turned on, after the end of the solar conjunction. This marks the official start of the Primary Science Phase (PSP) of HiRISE, and MRO in general. During this time we expect to image 1-2% of Mars in high resolution. Starting late Tuesday evening/early Wednesday morning, we will begin to receive pictures from Mars, without much of a pause for some time to come.

I would just like to offer my thanks to all of those who helped to make HiRISE at Ball Aerospace, the flight engineers at JPL, operations team, programmers, targeting specialists, scientists, and everyone else involved in the project. The long period of preparation is over, and now we begin with the real thing. Have a fun 2-year PSP all!

A few of us were at HiROC Saturday, getting our parts of the operations process in order for the upcoming start of primary science (PSP).

That’s GuyMac on the left, HiCommander (me!) in the middle, and HiKu on the right.

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We got some more pictures of everyone looking at the first data to come down. You can tell how excited everyone is. (And don’t we look great in our new shirts??

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A picture of everyone at HiROC, full of reporters. We are hard at work trying to get the pictures ready to be released to the public.