[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.

[charborob]

[snip]
Nothing has really grabbed me, not like in the early days when every pic made me shake my head with disbelief.
[snip]
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 think part of the reason for this loss of interest, so to speak, is that the MRO images are taken from a vertical point of view. This is very useful scientifically, but for the average person, this is an unusual way of viewing surface features, and meaningful mainly to specialists. We are used to seeing landscapes from the surface, and sometimes obliquely from an airplane. For public outreach, the MRO team should release more oblique views created from the stereoscopic coverage of the Martian surface. It would give the public a more vivid sense of "being there". In another thread, I asked about the possibility of constructing these views ourselves, but apparently, it is a high tech trick unavailable to "amateurs".

[mcaplinger]

I think part of the reason for this loss of interest, so to speak, is that the MRO images are taken from a vertical point of view.

This must explain why a MER image is on the front cover of TIME every week.

Frankly I'm not sure this loss of interest is any different than what we saw with MGS. The images would have to be pretty spectacular to elicit a "wow" response day after month after year. I think you guys have just gotten to the point that the instrument teams arrived at a long time ago.

THEMIS still releases an image every week. Does anyone here look at them? I'd wonder about the cost-benefit ratio of making a lot of effort to do regular releases, if even enthusiasts express dissatisfaction with such outreach efforts. Better to dump the data to the PDS and let you find the pretty ones.

[djellison]

THEMIS still releases an image every week. Does anyone here look at them?

Yup -I have a THEMIS image of the day item on my dashboard using webclip on OSX.

You have a point about the sustainability. Perhaps it's because the initial 'wow' isn't actually at the science or the image per se - but the capability inferred by the images - the demonstrated ability of the instrument. Once that 'wow - 30cm' or 'wow - 5000 pixels across' has died down - it's hard to find much to be excited about if you're not trained to know what you're looking at.

There are odd-balls to that pattern, you can always get a 'wow - a lander seen from orbit' or 'wow - the Earth!' moment. But generally, I don't think any ammount of outreach effort could maintain a laymans interest in instruments like HiRISE, CTX, THEMIS etc.

What I think I WOULD return to day after day is daily MARCI maps in the way I regularly check into the MODIS rapid response page to see how the UK's looking most days. The MARCI weather reports are a great treat in that regard - nice to see that instrument getting 'out' a little more.

A comparative analysis between MER, Cassini, SOHO, MRO and other missions website stats would be an interesting statistic. I may try and pull together forum-view stats for UMSF to see if the 'traffic' to each section varies in an obvious event-by-event way.

Doug