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The Planetary Society Blog
By Emily Lakdawalla
New Mars Express online image viewing tool
Mar. 20, 2007 | 13:38 PDT | 20:38 UTC
I got a notice in my inbox yesterday about a cool new tool for finding and displaying images from the HRSC camera aboard Mars Express. Here's a screen shot: This tool begins to show us the promised potential of Mars Express' HRSC data set -- namely, the topographic information that it acquires as a result of its stereo imaging capability. Because it's acquired as part of HRSC's imaging operations, the topographic data is precisely registered to the imaging data, which isn't true of the Mars Global Surveyor MOLA topographic data set. There are so far only a few HRSC images available so far with associated digital terrain models, but those images are pretty impressive! I look forward to seeing more.
Here's an excerpt from the press release about HRSCview.Press Release: March 19, 2007
Issued By: Gerhard Neukum, HRSC Principal Investigator
...
We have received word from the community that generally better and faster access to the data would be appreciated and DTMs [Digital Terrain Models] as the main asset of the HRSC experiment would be required for scientific needs and mission planning. Therefore, we are undertaking - with substantial support from our national space agency (DLR-Bonn) - the task of reprocessing all data for the derivation of high-resolution certified DTMs that will eventually be archived with ESA and NASA depending on successful negotiations and agreements.
The hi-res DTM production is being done in cooperation between my group at the FU and the Experiment Team under the leadership of Ralf Jaumann at DLR. Also, the need for faster access by the community at large for quick screening of the HRSC image data and some instant manipulation for a rough overview of the assets of the data through computer-based means before going to the ESA or NASA archives for substantial downloading efforts has been expressed to us. The solution we have come to is to establish the following:
HRSCview: Online visualisation of the Mars Express HRSC dataset
A website that provides the ability to explore within the nearly 2 TB of HRSC images is opened for public access thorough a joint website of the Freie Universitaet Berlin and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) at:
http://www.geoinf.fu-berlin.de/hrscviewweb/
HRSCview permits exploration within the images by carrying out on-the-fly data-subsetting, sub-sampling, stretching and compositing, and in the case of perspective views, projection. This means regions of interest can be explored at full resolution without needing to download full data-product sets.
It is possible to view colour and elevation composites with nadir images and select different colour stretches or infra-red channel substitution. It offers perspective views with a choice of viewpoint and exaggeration. The data are explored using Mars surface coordinates, making it simple to move between multiple images of the same location, between adjacent images, and also from a global image-footprint map directly into an HRSC image at a position of interest. The pixel scale of the view can be selected; distance and elevation scale bars are provided.
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