Do you use the IAS Viewer to view our JPEG2000 (JP2) image files at full-resolution (which we highly recommend!)? If you use a Mac running OSX, you might be having trouble. Don’t worry, there’s a solution!

It appears that a recent Java patch causes problems launching the IAS Viewer client and other Java-based software launched via Java Web Start. The update changed the location of the Java Web Start application so that the system opens the downloaded JNLP file as a text file, most likely with something called Dashcode. One of our system administrators found a solution on an Apple support discussion archive. You should only have to do this once to fix the problem:

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Now you can explore Mars with version 5 of Google’s 3D exploration software (still called Earth)! HiRISE team members worked with Google to make this possible. Previously, you had to perform a few tricks to get it going, but now it is all built in smoothly. To switch to Mars. select the planet drop-down at the top center.

You can enable footprints for HiRISE, CTX, CRISM, Mars Express’ HRSC and Global Surveyor’s MOC.

By clicking on a HiRISE footprint, you can get a window with a hi-res preview and a link to the observation page on our website.

A nice addition is text from (our fellow Tucsonan) William K. Hartmann’s A Traveler’s Guide To Mars, explaining the geologic provinces on Mars (click on the green ‘hiker’ icons).

You can see screenshots and get more info from the unofficial Google Earth blog and download Windows, Mac or Linux versions from Google’s Earth site.

It looks like there is some broad-scale elevation data. Shift+up or down tilts your view, shift + right or left spins, and page up / page down zooms.

Have fun exploring Mars!

Our latest release includes more products from the original Phoenix descent observation, which include the color CCDs hand-mosaicked over the red filter CCDs. We’ve also been working with the Phoenix and MRO engineering teams to identify the location of the heat shield in the image (left). It’s pretty incredible that we caught the lander just after releasing the heat shield – a few more seconds, and it would have been out of the scene.

Emily Lakdawalla continues her excellent blog coverage in this article, which does a great job of explaining some of the reasons why this image was especially difficult to take. Along the way, she includes a tutorial on TDI (Time-Delay-Integration), written by one of the engineers that helped build the instrument. TDI is the method HiRISE uses to gather lots of light into its CCDs, and it’s one of the reasons we get such high signal-to-noise in our images. It’s a complicated concept, but it’s an important one for understanding HiRISE’s incredible imaging abilities, as well as its limitations.

From her blog post:

This is a fascinating story showing how necessary it sometimes is to have a deep understanding of an instrument in order to understand the data that comes from it. …It can be dangerous to read too much into space images until you have studied how the cameras really work.

It’s a great post – she deserves a cookie!

Hey, I’ll bet you didn’t notice, but the IAS Viewer has been upgraded to version 3.1.2.

One important feature enhancement is that the auto-stretch preference is now “sticky.” You can disable auto-stretch once and for all, as indicated in the screenshots below.

With this change, you can load our images and see them in the original stretch, while still having the ability to re-stretch within higher-resolution areas.

GeoTIFF is an industry standard for embedding geographic information in images. Beginning soon, HiRISE RDRs will include GeoTIFF info in the Jpeg-2000 files. All of the information about the image will continue to be in the RDR label (.LBL plain text file), but with this additional info in the JP2, image viewing software that supports GeoTIFF will be able to take advantage of it.

For example, such software could display the actual coordinates on Mars of the pixels you are looking at, allow you to measure features directly in physical units, or stitch together images based on their absolute location on the planet. A number of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) applications use GeoTIFF; many on our science team have been waiting patiently for this feature to be rolled out.

We have already begun to produce RDRs with GeoTIFF, and they will start appearing in our weekly releases. At some point, a major reprocessing effort will be underway to bring this feature (and others) to all of our pre-existing products.

This brings up the topic of versioning: namely, how to tell which version of a HiRISE product you are working with.

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We didn’t have any crazy April Fool’s Day jokes here at HiROC yesterday, but there were a few fun incidents. One of our post-docs announced he had been offered a tenure-track faculty position (which isn’t that unrealistic, actually!). Despite the lack of any actual job opening, he got a few congratulatory emails before someone spilled the beans.

Our HiPlan developer, the HiCommander, had a little surprise for us in our planning software, like last year. I was forced to click “Authorize” in order to use HiPlan, and now I owe HiRISE $620. Hopefully that’s a tax-deductible business expense.

On another topic, a number of us have signed up for Google’s new Mars expedition. It seems like the next logical career move after MRO’s mission is complete. In fact, we’re scouting potential sites for Virgle City right now. That’s assuming their references to the first “manned journey to Mars” are not to be taken literally, and that women will be considered as potential colonists. (ahem.)

All downlink tasks I perform follow a particular development path: (1) I practice and jot down manual procedures; (2) over time I attempt to automate subtasks by using Perl or other tools, as best I can (I am not a software developer); and (3) our talented software developers write software that automates the task completely, or at the very least speeds it up considerably. Of course, this is always just in time for me to be assigned new tasks!One of my daily tasks is monitoring data quality and paying attention to missing or gapped raw image channel files (up to 28 channels per observations.) My tools: our internal reporting website HiReport, Terminal, and Microsoft Excel. I look through a list of observations in my web browser, click on those that appear to be missing channels or are flagged as “INCOMPLETE”, and copy and paste information about the problematic channels into Excel. I then add some additional notes and take any required actions.

A few days ago I realized that after more than a year, I was still in the manual stage of monitoring data quality and not making good use of existing tools to help streamline the process. All that cutting and pasting was beginning to get ridiculous, even more so during a period of high data rates and an increasing number of observations.

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The IAS Viewer is our preferred tool for looking at HiRISE images in full resolution. It provides excellent support for the JP2 file format and the interactive streaming protocol for JP2 which is called JPIP. It is written in Java and installs automatically in a secure “sandbox” on your computer when you visit a link to it. These links are in a section labeled “JP2 Quicklook (IAS Viewer)” on the HiRISE web site; every observation will have that on the right-hand side of the page.

We use the IAS Viewer ourselves in most cases. A prerequisite is having Java installed already on your computer; I’m pretty sure that both Microsoft Vista and Apple’s OS X do that by default, and most older versions of those operating systems do too. You can check by going to java.com and clicking on the “Do I Have Java?” link.

I have tested the IAS Viewer on a 2001-era computer (an iMac DV) with a low-speed wireless connection. Surprisingly, it worked about as good as on our work machines (dual or quad-core Macs with gigs of memory and ultra-fast Ethernet connections to nearby servers). With much older PC’s or via dial-up it may not be usable, I expect. But the bottom line is, you do not need to have the latest and greatest in computing technology to fill your screen with a steady source of high-res HiRISE pixels.

Early in the mission, our partners at NASA Ames put together a site using a Flash applet called Zoomify. They still maintain this site; however, it takes time and effort for them to keep up with our releases. Zoomify uses “tile pyramids”, or multiple copies of image data at each zoom resolution. So not only must the data be transferred, it must then be rendered into many tiles, occupying slightly more space than the original data. For that reason, they convert to JPEG, which eliminates some of the highest resolution information. Still, it may be faster because the lower resolutions are pre-rendered and the highest resolution has been decreased. Flash, like the IAS Viewer, is supported on Windows, Mac, and (x86 flavors of) Linux.

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One of our team members, Ross Beyer, put together a way of getting MRO data into the Google Earth tool: http://orrery.us/node/54

I finally got around to trying it out, and it’s very easy to set up following his instructions. It allows you to see the footprints of acquired HiRISE images on a larger context map, and the Google [Planet] interface is really easy to use. Clicking on a red H footprint gives you a short description of the image, and a link right to our image release page, where you can browse or download the image products. CTX footprints are available, too. If I’m understanding this right, these KML files pull all currently released data from the PDS, so whenever we release data, the new stuff is automatically included.

The basemaps aren’t in 3-D (yet – maybe someday?!), so the perspective view isn’t much use, but you can kind of trick yourself into thinking it looks 3-D with the shaded relief maps. You can “fly” over the planet, zooming in & out, which is really fun.

I had trouble trying to get two basemaps visible at once (colorized MOLA elevation over the greyscale MDIM). With just one basemap, though, it works just fine, and it’s very fast (this probably depends a lot on your internet connection).

One really nice thing about the Google interface is when there are two overlapping footprints (which all of our stereo images are), clicking on them expands the choices and allows you to pick one or the other. Other tools I’ve used don’t handle this as nicely, and sometimes it’s impossible to select the “bottom” one.

Nice job, Ross & Google!

Lately we’ve been working hard dealing with a LOT of extra data. Because Mars is getting closer to the Earth (you can visualize that in this view of the solar system), we are approaching the peak data rate for the entire primary mission. Not that we’re complaining! This just means the Targeting Specialists are planning many more images, and we’re making those images as big as we can.

Unfortunately, we can’t just make them all the largest size the instrument is capable of taking, because our camera will get too hot. If it overheats, the instrument will shut itself off in order to prevent any damage to the electronics. So we have to be careful, and only plan images that won’t overheat HiRISE. In order to predict those temperatures, we use a tool called HiTemp (of course!). Here’s what it looks like (click on the image to see a bigger version).

This program reads in our planning files, and then models the temperatures of two key spots on the focal plane of the camera. It’s our job to make sure we don’t go above the dotted red line – this gives us a comfortable buffer below the scary solid red line. That’s when HiRISE would shut off, or safe. We know from experience by now that this is a big pain in the neck – a lot of work is required to get us back up & running, and we miss observations while we’re turned off. So we watch our HiTemp plots!