Howdy, readers. About every two years, the orbits of Mars and Earth work to put Mars behind the Sun when viewed from Earth. In this arrangement, the Sun makes it pretty tough to communicate with the various spacecraft we’ve got orbiting the Red Planet and creeping around on its surface. This arrangement, called “solar conjunction,” lasts for about five weeks. During this time, we generally reduce operations to the bare minimum required to keep these marvels running. MRO’s HiRISE is no exception, do we haven’t been taking images for the past five weeks.

That ends today, though. Mars recently came out of solar conjunction and operations have been ramping up. We ought to be starting our first post-conjunction image at around 9 PM Tucson time (MST) tonight, February 22.

I mention this fact to draw your attention to a pretty cool feature of the Google Earth desktop application. It’s been around for a while, but you might not have heard about it. It’s called Live from Mars, and it shows you the orbits of MRO and Odyssey as they’re orbiting Mars right now. You can also see the image footprints for upcoming HiRISE (MRO) and THEMIS (Odyssey) observations. Even cooler, you can virtually ride along with MRO or Odyssey, your point of view tracking along those orbits.

To set it up, launch the latest version of the Google Earth desktop application. Find the little menu button that looks like Saturn, and click it to drop down the menu. Select Mars.

Once Mars comes into view, go to the Layers panel and open up the Mars Gallery group. You should see Live from Mars. Open up that group, and you’ll see Live from Odyssey and Live from MRO. Open up the Live from MRO group and you’ll find MRO Orbit, Fly Along, and HiRISE Footprints. Activate those and you’ll see a segment of the MRO orbit; you might see a HiRISE footprint or two, but our images are so small compared to the size of Mars that you might need to zoom in a bit to find them.

If you double-click the Fly Along item, your point of view will switch to that of MRO orbiting Mars. As you travel along, you’ll come across upcoming HiRISE observations, such as the one called out in the above image.

Cool, isn’t it?

The data rate from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) – in orbit around Mars on the other side of the Sun from our perspective here on the Earth – is set to increase soon, marking the end of solar conjunction and the beginning of MRO’s Extended Science Phase (ESP).  HiRISE will capture the first image of our next phase in Mars exploration this weekend.  Like all first images after the HiRISE camera has been idle for awhile, we will look especially closely for, but do not expect, any issues.

In these days leading up to the beginning of ESP the downlink team is checking our processing software and tools to make sure they are ready for the observation ID prefix change from PSP_XXXXXX_XXXX to ESP_XXXXXX_XXXX. The automated processing pipelines are ready to go.  My own validation and reporting Perl scripts make use of modules that are mission phase aware and pattern match file extensions instead of observation ID prefixes, so I think I am set. Any minor tools we miss can be easily updated as necessary.

With improvements to our tools and new procedures, we can sometimes recover image data previously stuck in the original raw data files. During this quiet period, I had an opportunity to go back to old observations, some from early in the Primary Science Phase (PSP), and recover errant channels that failed our processing software at the time.   This resulted in a few new channels of image data that we will include in a later reprocessing of our images.  For example, PSP_001746_1515 was originally processed without the RED1_0 channel. You can see this channel gap if you click on the observation’s “Full image (grayscale, non-map projected)” link.  An improved mosaic will include most of RED1_0, albeit with a small image data gap near one end.  Why did we not create this channel before?  Sometimes a data gap occurs between channels, obliterating the second channel’s science header.  The software at Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s RSDS that splits our image data into separate raw data channel files cannot figure out where to split the image data correctly within this gap and so image data from two or more channels are trapped in one raw data file.  When this jumbo raw data file hits our EDRgen processing pipeline here in Tucson, Arizona, the tool called HiRISE_Observation became confused when it discovered image data from another channel near the end of the file, and the error it flags halts the EDRgen processing pipeline.

We now have improved tools and procedures for dealing with this problem.  By running HiRISE_Observation outside of the EDRgen pipeline, it will successfully produce an EDR for the first channel before it complains about the second channel’s image data.  While we would love to get at that second (or third, or later!) channel’s image data, right now we recoverthe data that is easiest to reach.  Someday, we might have a tool that will recognize a missing science channel header, reconstruct this header, and then fit the header in correctly between the first channel and the additional channels stuck in one raw data file.

When will you see the new PSP_001746_1515 products, newly improved with the recovered RED1_0 channel?  Hopefully in a few months.  While I have recovered this EDR (as well as EDRs from other observations), we would like to wait to reprocess the entire observation until we have even better image calibration built into our processing pipelines.  It makes little sense for me to reprocess this observation now when we are just going to be reprocessing it again sometime early next year. Once all of our improvements are in place in the upgraded processing pipelines, we will reprocess ALL of our observations, a huge undertaking.

Next week we will be back to our normal downlink activities: making sure the processing pipelines behave, validating new observations, providing daily reports to the rest of the team, and processing color and RDR mosaics.  We will also add in routine creation and validation of anaglyphs and preparation for our next Planetary Data System (PDS) release in March.  The quiet time during solar conjuction was nice, but we are anxious to see new images from Mars!

We’re in the midst of the last cycle in MRO’s Primary Science Phase (PSP). Conjunction is coming up, when Mars is behind the Sun, so we won’t be able to communicate with the spacecraft for a few weeks. We’ll get a welcome break during that time – Uplink will have two whole planning cycles off, and Downlink will get a chance to catch up with their processing.

I can’t believe it’s been two years since the last conjunction and the start of PSP! A lot has changed since we started out with those first images. (more…)

Phoenix has announced on its Twitter feed that it’s likely at the end of its mission. They haven’t heard from the lander in over a week at this point, and it’s not looking very hopeful that they’ll have enough power to do so in the next few weeks before we go into conjunction.

The last image we took of the lander shows it sitting pretty, just as it has been since May 25th. We’ll take another picture this week, and probably continue to monitor the site after conjunction to study how frost covers the area. Next spring, MRO will be listening to see if Phoenix wakes up and calls home, but the odds of that are exceedingly slim, despite its epithet (see this blog entry for more about why this is most likely the real end of the mission).

I didn’t think I’d be so sad! It has been an exciting and successful mission, and I’m glad I could be involved in a small part of it. RIP, Phoenix! …or, rather, one of the better-written epitaphs submitted in Wired’s contest to eulogize the mission. There are some great ones in that list – some clever, some heartwarming, and some just funny. Personally, I like Phoenix’s last tweet best:

01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000 <3

(Unless you’re also a machine, you’ll probably need a binary converter like this one to get the message.)

At about 11:34 UTC, DSN received a transmission from MRO that HiRISE was successfully turned on, after the end of the solar conjunction. This marks the official start of the Primary Science Phase (PSP) of HiRISE, and MRO in general. During this time we expect to image 1-2% of Mars in high resolution. Starting late Tuesday evening/early Wednesday morning, we will begin to receive pictures from Mars, without much of a pause for some time to come.

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!

Sorry we haven’t been posting much lately!

To tell the truth, some of us are experiencing a little bit of a lull. We’re in conjunction right now — this means that the Sun is directly between Earth and Mars, so we can’t communicate with the spacecraft. (Here’s a link with a few diagrams to illustrate this.)

The HiRISE instrument is turned off, and we’re not taking any images. However, there are other activities going on at HiROC….

We start imaging again on November 8, and a few of us are already planning for that. PSP, the Primary Science Phase, is divided into two-week cycles. The first cycle is rm001, the second rm002, etc. Each cycle has a Targeting Specialist assigned to it (this one isn’t me, or I wouldn’t have time to write this!). The Targeting Specialist works with a member of the science team, the “Co-Investigator of the Pay Period,” (”pay period” because of the two-week cycle) or CIPP. The CIPP helps to choose scientifically important targets, and the Targeting Specialist does the scheduling and commanding. They work together on coordinating with other teams, choosing camera parameters, etc. There are a lot of details that need to be worked out!

(more…)

The second image has already started to come down. We are all still on our high from the first image. To imagine that we will have thousands of these images in the next few years, it’s incredible!

Things are starting to calm down here a bit. We’re enjoying some food, going back to the engineering data to make sure everythings running perfect, and all in all, we’re just starting to soak in the events of the day. But we won’t have long, in the next week we will take about 70 of these pictures, before we are turned of for the upcoming Solar conjunction. Who knows what mysteries of Mars will be unveiled during this exciting time!