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Planetary News: Mars (2007)New Color Views of Mars Landing Site CandidatesOctober 10, 2007
The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter today released 143 color images valuable to researchers studying possible landing sites for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, a mission to deploy a long-distance rover carrying a deck of sophisticated science instruments on Mars in 2010. The color images are online at the HiRISE website, and are available through the Planetary Data System, NASA's space mission data archive. The camera team also released a color movie, scrolling over one candidate Mars Science Laboratory landing site in Nili Fossae, at 21 degrees north latitude and 74 degrees east latitude. The animation shows a range of enhanced colors that correspond to what Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's imaging spectrometer has determined to be hydrated clay minerals and unaltered volcanic rocks. "The clay minerals are especially promising in the search for ancient life on Mars," said University of Arizona (UA) Professor Alfred S. McEwen, principal investigator for the high resolution camera. The color images released today were taken at or near about 30 proposed landing sites for the 2009 mission. "Scientists planning the Mars Science Laboratory must soon choose the one site on Mars where we can best investigate the extent to which Mars' environment is or was capable of supporting life -- no easy task," said Ashwin Vasavada, Mars Science Laboratory deputy project scientist. "We've intentionally waited for the reconnaissance from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to help us zero in on those places." Less than a year since beginning the prime science phase of its mission, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has passed a mission-success milestone for the amount of data returned. The data-volume target of 26 terabytes, which was surpassed this week, is equivalent to about 5,000 CD-ROMs full and exceeds the total from all other current and past Mars missions combined. The biggest shares of the data come from two of the orbiter's six science instruments: the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment and the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars. Since November 2006, the orbiter's high-resolution camera has taken more than 3,500 huge, sharp images released in black-and-white. The camera carries 10 red filter detectors, two blue-green filter detectors and 10 infrared detectors. Beginning this week, images will be released in color as well as black-and-white on the camera team's website. The colors are false color, not the way Mars would look to human eyes. The images are processed to maximize color differences, a technique useful for analyzing landscapes. "Color data are proving very useful in interpreting geologic processes and history on Mars," McEwen said. "The images we're releasing today include views of some of the most interesting and compositionally diverse areas on the planet." The camera team developed computer software that automatically processes images from the different color filters into color images. "The technical hurdle has been that the sets of different color detectors are staggered within the camera focal plane array, and the spacecraft isn't perfectly steady as it operates in space," said HiRISE operations manager, Eric Eliason. The spacecraft has excellent pointing control thanks to superb engineering, but HiRISE pixels cover an extremely small angular diameter, which gives the camera its ability to sample the surface at 30 centimeters per pixel (about 12 inches) from 300 kilometers (about 185 miles) above the surface. The slightest spacecraft motion causes shifts in the camera pointing in unpredictable ways. There's only a split-second time lag between the time each color filter records the same spot on Mars as the camera view sweeps over the planet, but that's enough time for spacecraft motion to knock the colors out of register by up to a few pixels. "You can't just take the different color images and lay them down on each other adjusting only for the slight time lag and get a sharp picture," Eliason said. HiRISE software developer Guy McArthur and applied mathematics undergraduate student Sarah Mattson put a lot of work into developing code that now successfully correlates the data from the different detectors. McArthur developed software that automates color correlation processing at HiROC, the HiRISE Operations Center at the UA. Color is a boon to geologists who have been trying to discriminate different surface materials and their relation to the topography, McEwen said. "Color clearly identifies basic material distinctions like dust, sand or rocks, light-toned layered material, and frost or ice," he said. Color also helps geologists correlate layers in the Martian terrain. And scientists will be able to combine HiRISE data with CRISM data to make detailed maps of minerals and soil types on the planet. A single HiRISE image will often be a multigigabyte image that measures 20,000 pixels by 50,000 pixels, which includes a 4,000-by-50,000 pixel region in three colors. It can take a computer up to three hours to process such an image. McEwen decided to process images that support selection of the Mars Science Laboratory landing site first. "The MSL is holding a landing site workshop later this month, so the color images had to be ready a couple of weeks in advance to be useful," McEwen said. |
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