[X] My Assistant

[um3k]

Has anyone played around with the HiRISE PDS release images yet? More specifically, color images? I have no time to do anything.

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/pds_release.php
http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/Missions/MRO_mission.html

[Stu]

Can I ask something that's been on my mind for a while? Is anyone else out there wondering why the good folks behind the MRO mission aren't making more of its images? Or taking... oh jeez, how do I put this without sounding ungrateful... more exciting, more stimulating images?

I mean, looking at that picture up there I thought, like Doug, "B****y hell!!" Look what it can do! That detail! But every week - at least for the past couple of months or so - I've gone to the MRO site on New Release day, looked at the images and although I haven't thought "So what?" I have thought "Hmmm... ok...". Nothing has really grabbed me, not like in the early days when every pic made me shake my head with disbelief. Lots of pictures of polygonal structures at the poles... strange layering here and there... dunefields... all very interesting scientifically, I'm sure, and very useful for planning further missions certainly, but nothing startling, nothing hypnotic for people not directly involved in the field.

I am NOT putting down MRO, no-one suggest that I am, please. But I do know that while this mission had me almost rabid with expectation and excitement in the days just after landing now I find myself getting a little ho-hum about the images being released. I think they're just too large scale. I'd love to see extreme close-ups of surface features, showing more familiar scales. I know anyone with a decent broadband service and a good PC etc can do that for themselves if they download and peruse the images at their leisure, but there must be many, many people like me who are still on dialup who are using less-than-state-of-the-art PCs who would love to be able to see images like the ones OWW and Nirgal posted above.

Again, I'm not disrespecting MRO or anyone behind it. I just think that OWW's pic shows the real capability of the camera, and that, perhaps, more could be made of it. The most amazing images for me have shown crumbling cliff faces, mesas casting long jagged shadows, things like that. I think we need to see more of those - and if they're already on the pictures, then dramatic features like those need to be zoomed in on and posted as pictures in their own right.

Not criticising. Just a little frustrated.

[elakdawalla]

Can I ask something that's been on my mind for a while? Is anyone else out there wondering why the good folks behind the MRO mission aren't making more of its images? Or taking... oh jeez, how do I put this without sounding ungrateful... more exciting, more stimulating images?

Well, don't the HiRISE team release pretty much EVERYTHING they take to their website eventually? This is in marked contrast to most teams, who do very well to release at most one image per day (which is still quite a lot). If other teams are more selective, it's more likely that each choice will be more exciting. With HiRISE we are getting the ho-hum (*cough* Phoenix landing sites *cough cough*) along with the great, and everything in between. Consider MER. How thrilling is each and every Navcam drive image? (Are the northern plains aesthetically equivalent to the MER Sundial?)

Also, the best stuff in HiRISE images, IMO, is found when you look at the images at near their full resolution, and hunt around for fun features. None of us seems to have time to do that for all the images. So finding true greatness is hit and miss. That makes it all the more important for each of us to post cool stuff here when we find it.

--Emily

[Stu]

Also, the best stuff in HiRISE images, IMO, is found when you look at the images at near their full resolution, and hunt around for fun features.

Thanks Emily, appreciate the feedback. That's exactly my point. As most people here know by now, I do a lot of what's now trendily called "Outreach" (aka 'standing at the front of a drafty church hall or community centre showing spacey pics to the public' ) and to be brutally honest I can't really use most of the MRO images as they are. The images that I can and do use succesfully are the smaller scale ones, the crops I've managed to take from the large images, and features people here have picked out and kindly given me permission to use - the crumbling ledges, shadow-casting mesas, etc. I think that the results of HiRISE - heralded as "The People's Camera" I seem to remember? - are not being shared adequately. And by that I don't mean anything is being held back, I know they release everything, but I think it would be a good idea for the team to do some of that "hunting around for fun features" you referred to and put those pics on the website too. That's the way they'll get people more inspired and excited by the camera, the mission, and Mars itself. Because let's be honest, MRO is not exactly enjoying a very high profile right now. Discussion about its images here, on what is probably the most passionate and knowledgeable space exploration forum there is, has reduced greatly. We used to drool over each release of new images moments after they appeared. Now... well, not so much. Which is no big deal, these things wax and wane, but still...

I'm sure the team have images of their own favourite places, screen-grabs of "wow!" features that impressed them. We and the public would enjoy seeing those too, alongside the BIG images that are wonderful in their own right.

[djellison]

I can't really use most of the MRO images as they are.

No one can. That's the problem. Until someone comes out with a 20,000 x 120,000 pixel projector. Before the advent of the viewer, I tried to download and view these things in full res - and I got a little insight into just how hard it must be to process these things - let alone have an informative web-page for each one.

They do show interesting snippets with a few of them, and we've had four rounds of science output ( http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/sim/ ) which include not only what you're talking about but scientific discourse as well. Missions can't maintain high profiles for ever - it's impossible. Spirit and Opportunity are not high profile at the moment. The effort ( i.e. money ) involved in maintaining an ammount of outreach material like that simply isn't available. I wish it were - but it isn't.

There is so much data that it's going to take decades for it to be appreciated. Wihtout broadband, I'd say it's impossible to appreciate it at all - it's just a symptom of the instrument. The only way to enjoy it is via the IAS Viewer which makes every image brilliantly accesable for anyone with a reasonably good connection. Truthfully, I don't think they can do any more than that. Without that, you're only ever going to get 1% of the picture - metaphorically and literally - and to use it, you've got to have broadband - or extreme patience.

Doug