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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One by one, we’re introducing new uplink personnel to the complex system of uplink planning. In fact, each cycle so far has been planned by a new Targeting Specialist, so we’re still in the midst of a lot of training. Once we each get through one cycle, I think we’ll notice a big improvement in efficiency. Starting with cycle 007, new CIPPs (Co-Investigators of the Pay Period — the science team members who help plan observations for a given cycle) will also be visiting HiROC for a few weeks while they learn about the planning process. So the “cycle” of training continues, with Targeting Specialists training each other, and then passing that knowledge on to new CIPPs. We expect this to persist through PSP, since there are ten Co-Investigators, plus their post-doctoral researchers and students who may get involved.

Special activities like off-planet observations provide a little variety, a change from the cycle of planning and the constant cascade of downlinked data. Some of these approaching activities include:

• Stellar calibration — 11 January
• Updating the LUTs (Look-Up Tables) we use to convert from 16-bit to 8-bit data on board the spacecraft — mid-January
• Deimos calibration — late January

We’re currently developing and testing the command sequences for these events.

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!

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

HiKu is part of the operations staff on the uplink side of things. He’s on the team that does the targeting and the planning. What was he doing on a Saturday? Same thing he does every day: targeting and planning.

GuyMac and I are part of the software development team—we write the programs the ops team uses to do their job. GuyMac works primarily for the downlink group. He spent the day on a program called HiVali, which will be used by the downlink ops team to make sure a given HiRISE image accomplished its goal.

I work for the uplink group. I spent the day working on a program with the second greatest HiRISE software name: the HOGG. That’s the HiRISE Observation Generation GUI. The “the” is an important part of its name, by they way. You don’t use HOGG to generate HiRISE camera parameters. You use the HOGG.

A lot of our HiRISE tools have funny names; the most common way to name a piece of software here is to get a one-word description of its function and then add “Hi” to it. The planning software? HiPlan. The commanding software? HiCommand. The validation software? HiVali. The camera temperature modeler? HiTemp.

I like “the HOGG” for three reasons. One, who doesn’t like hearing their peers use such a ridiculous word to talk about something serious? Two, it breaks the HiRISE naming convention. And three? I get to correct people and point out that the “the” is part of the name. Still, it’s only my second favorite HiRISE software name. My favorite?

That’d be the HiRISE photometry predictor.

HIPHOP.

I’ll write more about these tools in the coming weeks.

The countdown is over!