Mars Terrain that Tantalizes Explorers
Thursday, September 18th, 2008
Here are a few excerpts from yesterday’s University of Arizona story about our PDS release:
The HiRISE team has so far released a total 26.9 terabytes of data…. That amounts to more data than has been released by all previous deep space missions combined.
“If I showed each HiRISE image for 10 seconds, it would take me about 4 years to show them all,” said UA’s Alfred McEwen, HiRISE principal investigator.
…
Spacecraft motion pushes this electronic array so that it records the view down to Mars’ surface at a ground speed of about 3.2 kilometers per second, or about 7,000 miles per hour.
Skeptics doubted that a technique called “time integration delay,” needed to compensate for extremely short exposure times – about one ten-thousandth of a second per pixel – could produce sharp, unsmeared images.
But the technique has worked “wonderfully well,” thanks to accurate spacecraft pointing and stability and precise exposure time calculations, McEwen said.
Click here for full story.

