[meteorite-list] UA Team Cheers Launch of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, HiRISE

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri Aug 12 16:21:52 2005
Message-ID: <200508121959.j7CJxFT29810_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://uanews.org/cgi-bin/WebObjects/UANews.woa/8/wa/SciDetails?ArticleID=11437

UA Team Cheers Launch of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, HiRISE
By Lori Stiles
August 08, 2005

NASA launched a new orbiter called Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)
today (Aug. 12) as the next step in its ambitious Mars exploration
program.

MRO will return more data about the red planet than all previous Mars
missions combined, according to the U.S. space agency.

More than 40 University of Arizona researchers, family members and
friends are at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to cheer the
launch. The soon-to-fly orbiter payload includes UA's High Resolution
Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) -- the largest-diameter telescopic
camera ever sent to another planet.

"HiRISE is going to both resolve old mysteries and raise new questions
about Mars," said HiRISE principal investigator Alfred S. McEwen of
UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. "It's also going to address
specific questions related to future Mars exploration."

HiRISE, two other cameras, a spectrometer, a radar instrument and a
radiometer aboard MRO will examine Mars from the top of its atmosphere
to its underground layers. Scientists will use MRO to study the
history and distribution of martian water, characterize landing sites
for future missions -- including UA's 2007 Phoenix Mission to Mars --
and provide a high-data-rate communications relay between Mars lander
missions and Earth.

Professor McEwen and his team will plan HiRISE observations, upload
commands, monitor instrument performance, retrieve, process and
analyze image data at the HiRISE Operations Center, called "HiROC,"
located in the Lunar and Planetary Lab's Sonett Building on the UA
campus in Tucson.

"The HiRISE team is more than excited to see the successful launch of
MRO," HiRISE co-investigator and HiROC manager Eric Eliason said. "
We've invested a lot of hard work to ensure HiRISE is the best
possible camera for this mission. We've been practicing and rehearsing
how to command our instrument. We've been developing software to
process and analyze returned images and now we're looking forward to
finally having some real images of Mars."

The 145-pound (65 kg) HiRISE camera - the largest instrument on the
MRO payload - features a 20-inch (half-meter) primary mirror - the
largest on any telescope ever sent beyond Earth orbit.

HiRISE will take ultra-sharp photographs over 3.5-mile (6 kilometer)
swaths of the martian landscape, resolving rocks and other geologic
features as small as 40 inches (one meter) across. It will take
pictures in stereo and color, too, while it zooms along at more than
7,800 mph (3 and 1/2 km per second) about 190 miles (300 km) above
Mars' surface.

"HiRISE is capable of getting such views over any selected region of
Mars, providing a bridge between orbital remote sensing and landed
missions," McEwen said.

MRO's planned orbit is more than 20 percent lower than the average for
any of the three current Mars orbiters, which are NASA's Mars Odyssey
and Mars Global Surveyor, and the European Space Agency's Mars
Express. Low orbit is an advantage when it comes to seeing Mars at
higher resolution than ever before.

The orbiter will reach Mars in March 2006. The spacecraft will
gradually adjust its elliptical orbit to a circular orbit by
aerobraking, a technique that creates drag using the friction of
careful dips into the planet's upper atmosphere. MRO's 25-month
primary science phase begins in November 2006.

HiROC researchers say they expect to process 1,000 gigantic
high-resolution images and 9,000 smaller high-resolution images during
the science phase of the MRO mission.

"These are huge images, and we've been developing techniques to deal
with images as large as 20,000 pixels wide and 60,000 pixels long,"
McEwen said. It would take 1,200 typical computer screens to display
all of a large HiRISE image at full resolution. HiROC will acquire a
large-format printer for making photographs up to five feet wide and
10-to-15 feet long, McEwen added.

The HiRISE team has also been developing HiWeb, an Internet site that
expert Mars scientists and the general public worldwide can use to
suggest HiRISE imaging targets. HiRISE is called "the people's camera"
because anyone can suggest places on Mars for HiRISE to photograph and
because the images will be made publicly available as soon as possible.

Operations staff member Ingrid Daubar and senior software developer
Christian Schaller suggested a people-friendly metaphor for what they
will do at HiROC.

"Basically, you can think of what we do as aiming and focusing the
HiRISE camera, pushing the button to take a picture, downloading the
pictures to our computers and then processing the pictures," Daubar
said. "Of course, it's really much more complicated than that."

The first milestone after launch will be when McEwen and the HiRISE
team make their first observations of actual targets in the solar
system on Sept. 8, 2005. They have targeted Earth's moon and the Omega
Centauri star cluster to calibrate HiRISE and check its in-flight
performance. It may take several days for the big images to arrive at
HiROC.

What will HiRISE look at first when the science mission begins in
November 2006?

First planned targets include candidate landing sites for the 2007
Phoenix Mission to Mars, led by Peter Smith of UA's Lunar and
Planetary Laboratory. "We actually have only a limited time before
winter arrives at Mars' north pole and lighting conditions
deteriorate, so we want to do that quickly," McEwen said.

And if Spirit and Opportunity are still roving, photographing the Mars
Expedition Rover landing sites is very high priority, McEwen said.
Views of past Mars mission landing sites -- the successful Pathfinder
and Viking missions, and possibly the unsuccessful Mars Polar Lander
and Beagle 2 landing sites -- are also of interest, he added. Then
HiRISE will tackle a huge list of science priorities, McEwen said.

MRO weighs more than two tons fully fueled. To loft so big a
spacecraft, NASA will use a powerful Atlas V launch vehicle for the
first time on an interplanetary mission.

The mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of
the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, for the NASA Science
Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, is the
prime contractor for the project and built the spacecraft. Ball
Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., designed, built and
tested the $40 million HiRISE camera.
Received on Fri 12 Aug 2005 03:59:15 PM PDT