UA Mars photos ‘overwhelmingly’ clear
by Larry Copenhaver on Sep. 30, 2006, under Education, LocalHiRISE camera orbiting red planet yielding 3D color
Anjani Polit, a targeting specialist with HiRISE, watches the download of high-resolution photos from Mars taken by UA's HiRISE telescope/camera.
With a picture-perfect day for University of Arizona HiRISE scientists in the rear-view mirror, it’s full speed ahead as never-before-seen images of Mars keep rolling in.
“What we want to do is get two images of these sites to see things in stereo to get a third dimension,” said Alfred S. McEwen, UA scientist and principal investigator of the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, often called HiRISE.
“We are overwhelmed with these first images,” he said. “I feel great. We have a fantastic experiment. It’s incredible.”
“It was like kids on Christmas morning when they started coming in,” added Ben Pearson, 22, a computer programmer for HiRISE. “To say we were excited is an understatement.”
“The data has been so clean, and we are seeing things on a scale we’ve never seen before,” said HiRISE team member Laszlo Keszthelyi, 38.
“Our first picture was of a canyon floor in the Valles Marineris complex,” said Eric Eliason, HiRISE operations manager. The giant canyon system is far larger than Arizona’s Grand Canyon.
“(The images) look pretty cool, but it takes us a couple of days to make good color images,” Eliason said. Figuring calibration is necessary because the scans of the camera, which in some ways mimic the way a photocopier picks up images, takes place in three separate motions.
“It takes a lot of work to register those three colors,” he said. “To register the color bands, we have to do some work in our imaging, but I can assure you that we will have color in a few days, and it will be spectacular.”
“We want these first images to be perfect,” Eliason said. “If they are a little out of register, we want to make them right.
“We will be having engineers look at our imaging in great detail,” Eliason said. The first indication is that our camera is very well focused and the exposure times we chose were very good. I don’t think we could ask for anything better.”
HiRISE is the most powerful camera to be used outside of Earth’s orbit. It is orbiting the red planet aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
It is so powerful it could resolve an object as small as a military-style officer’s hat on the surface of Mars.
HiRISE took test images of Mars when it was as far as 1,600 miles away from the planet in March. After months of “aerobraking,” involving sending the bus-sized spacecraft through Mars’ upper atmosphere 426 times between early April and Aug. 30, the orbiter settled into its so-called scientific orbit.
The spacecraft fired six thrusters to reach final science orbit Sept. 11. The orbit crosses near Mars’ north and south poles at altitudes ranging from 155 miles to 196 miles.
The current phase of the spacecraft’s mission is designed to test all the observing modes so that there is a smooth start to the primary science phase in November.
One of those objectives is to photograph potential landing sites for UA’s Phoenix Lander Mission scheduled to blast off in August. The NASA Scout-class Phoenix Mission is an international lander mission, led by UA’s Peter Smith, slatedfor a May 2008 touchdown in Mars’ north polar region.
“The north polar cap and the Phoenix Mission landing region are our big priority targets for the early science phase, and so we’ve included them on our targeting check-out,” McEwen said.
“HiRISE’s best chance for photographing candidate Phoenix mission landing sites is in October and November because the sun is getting lower as northern Mars moves into fall,” McEwen added.
Other imaging targets include about 40 other locations, including giant Victoria Crater where the Mars rover Opportunity is standing by. Photos of the crater could give rover operators ideas on how to steer in to the crater, which they want to explore.
Engineers will turn off the HiRISE camera for a solar conjunction that starts the second week of October.
A solar conjunction occurs when the sun is aligned between Earth and Mars, obstructing communications with the spacecraft for about three weeks.
CLOCKWISE FROM LOWER LEFT: Livio Tornabene; Alfred S. McEwen, principal investigator for HiRISE; Lisa McFarlane, targeting specialist; and Anjani Polit, targeting specialist, examine high-resolution photos from Mars taken by UA's HiRISE telescope-camera.
———
ON THE WEB
For more on the HiRISE mission, go to:
