Here’s a few pictures of HiROC people with their first look at the HiRISE pictures.

First look at the pictures!

We are hoping to release these pictures to the general public sometime today, stay tuned!

It is an amazing site at HiROC now. The team members all look like kids at Christmas time, opening that present that they’ve wanted for so very long. There are already amazing things we want to study more, amazing things that we can learn from Mars already. It’s going to be an amazing two year Primary Science Phase! We are all transfixed, studying these incredible pictures!

We’ve been looking at the first images for the last several minutes, they are incredible. We have identified many boulders, craters, channels, and other incredible features. Everything is looking as well as we have dreamed. Stay tuned for more!

The first picture is already coming in! They look amazing! Stay tuned for details!

We are now receiving the telemetry from the second image taken today from HiRISE. Everything from the spacecraft says that the second image was taken successfully. We are still awaiting the first image to come through, the quick look timer expires soon, meaning that we will be able to have our first look at the image sometime in the next few hours. Stay tuned for more.

Now we’re just sitting and waiting for the images to arrive. We’re all SO excited and impatient to see our new images, and this feels like sitting around in April waiting for Christmas morning…

Several pictures at HiROC of people waiting for the first science orbit image to come back for HiRISE.

I just flew in from LA this morning. We’ve been waiting for more than 4 years for these images. This should be great.

I certainly breathed a sigh of relief when we got confirmation from the telemetry that our first image was successfully acquired. Now we’re waiting in suspense to actually receive the image here at HiROC (HiRISE Operations Center). We have some computers set up in the center room so that we can all crowd around and see the image this afternoon.

I share an office with some of our downlink operations people, and right now I’m listening to them discuss their plans for the image processing that will take place this afternoon. They can tell you more about the details of the processing, but essentially right now they are making sure that all the plans and procedures are in place so that things go smoothly this afternoon. The last couple of days have been filled with testing, testing, and more testing.

We just received the telemetry to confirm that the HiRISE camera took its first picture!!! We all gathered around a screen projecting the telemetry data, and everyone cheered as the numbers came in. We’ll have to wait another ~6 hours or so to actually receive the image… The images go from the spacecraft to the DSN network, then to JPL, then to us.