We were pleased to welcome Linda Ronstadt (!!!) to the HiRISE Operations Center last week. We gave her and a few of her friends & family a presentation about the HiRISE mission, and we showed them some of our images in false color, 3-D and on the HiWall. Linda was incredibly nice and enthusiastic, and she had lots of great questions for us. Turns out rock stars love HiRISE! At least, we hope she enjoyed it as much as we did!

Despite being several years into our mission, we’re still seeing fresh faces on the HiRISE team. Recently we’ve added some new hires: student validators, researchers, and Targeting Specialists (with whom I work the most). We also continue to involve new scientists in operations – Participating Scientists or post-docs who haven’t gone through the planning process before. They come to HiROC to train during their first cycle, so we have a conveyor belt of visiting scientists as well.

The first Monday in June when they all started was krazy – lots of new people wandering around, office chaos and computer confusion…. By now they’re settling in and things are cooling down somewhat, although at least for the Targeting Specialists, we consider it about a 6-month process to get fully up to speed. In the first few weeks, their eyes are usually glazed over with information overload. At this point, they probably feel like they’ve been dropped in the hot oil of confusion (it’s also 106F in Tucson, which doesn’t help), then dipped in sticky, overly detailed procedures. Sweet procedures….

While we go through this training, the new kids are keeping us veterans on our toes – I keep finding places where the procedures we told them to follow are unclear, there’s a hole in the middle where steps are missing, outdated, or just plain wrong! So it’s really a shared learning experience. Besides, it’s always good to have some fresh, hot ideas and different perspectives to keep us from getting jaded. or dangerously skinny.

I’m excited for them – the sugary thrill when their first commands execute on the spacecraft, the pride when their first beautiful images come down, the feeling of fullness and mastery when they finally become fluent in the foreign language of acronyms…. Other firsts I’m sure they’re not looking forward to are their first mistake, their first late night, their first bad image…. So not everything is warm with honeyed nostalgia.

I’m sure they’ll all do a wonderful job, though, and be valuable additions to the team. In the meantime, though, I could really use some donuts…. Welcome, newbies!

A number of our science team members are at LPSC, the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, this week. This is a big gathering in Houston, Texas, where members of the planetary science community share their work from over the last year. Unfortunately, we don’t have an active blogger there, but I wanted to point out some other people sending out excellent reports about HiRISE science.

The Martian Chronicles has two great articles about presentations given by HiRISE Team Members: Spiders on Mars, from our Deputy PI Candice Hansen (more about this topic here, under “Spring at the South Pole of Mars”); and Layers and Swiss Cheese, which mentions two HiRISE people, Kathryn Fishbaugh and Shane Byrne. The polar group has been very active in helping to plan and target images, and their results are really cool (ha, ha!).

Star Stryder has also been at LPSC, with lots of stories through the week. The post Pingos, Polygons and other Puzzles mentions two types of Martian landforms I know members of our team are studying in HiRISE images, although there aren’t many specifics about their LPSC presentations. For some visuals to go along with the story, here are some HiRISE images of possible pingos and plentiful polygons.

I also thought their reports on speeches by the NASA bigwigs were very interesting: NASA Administrator Mike Griffin telling young scientists not to specialize in the face of changing funding priorities, and Alan Stern discussing possible MSL delays.

So, check out these reports, and if you see any other good ones, add a link below in the comments! Hopefully we’ll get more as the week progresses.

We’re just finishing up four days of having the whole HiRISE team visiting us here in Tucson. It’s been a great team meeting! We had updates on operations, and heard a lot about science results from HiRISE images. Some CRISM and THEMIS team members participated, too, so we got to see what other teams are doing and talk about collaborating and using multiple data sets. People are doing really exciting things with HiRISE data!

Also, our team is really growing!

You’ll notice a lot of new faces compared to a few years ago!

(more…)

The full images have been filtering in over the last few minutes, here’s the operations team looking at the entire first image for the first time!

We got some more pictures of everyone looking at the first data to come down. You can tell how excited everyone is. (And don’t we look great in our new shirts??

(more…)

A picture of everyone at HiROC, full of reporters. We are hard at work trying to get the pictures ready to be released to the public.

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!

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