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Scientists are particularly interested in Saturn's moon Titan because it's one of the few known moons with its own dense atmosphere. Titan's atmosphere is also thought to be very similar to what Earth's atmosphere was a long time ago. By learning about Titan, we'll learn about our own planet.
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2007-06-08 | SCIENCE
HiRISE Mars
HiRISE MarsBased on a University of Arizona, in Tucson news release
HiRISE Releases 1,200 Images, Launches Viewer on Newly Designed Website
Anyone connected by Internet can now see planet Mars better than at any time in history, through the eye of HiRISE, the most powerful camera ever to orbit another planet.
A University of Arizona-based team that runs the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has just released more than 1,200 Mars images to the Planetary Data System, the U.S. space agency's mission data archive.
Not only has the team released 1.7 Terabytes of HiRISE data -- the largest single dataset ever delivered to NASA's space mission data library -- but also a user-friendly way for the public to easily see HiRISE images.
Thanks to tools available on HiRISE's new Webpage at http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu, any Internet user can quickly pull up and explore the same remarkable images that both thrill and confound scientists. The detailed images have been vital in understanding the history of liquid water on Mars, thereby yielding clues about the potential for past life on the red planet.
"These images must contain hundreds of important discoveries about Mars," HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen of UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory said. "We just need time to realize what they are."
The HiRISE camera takes images of 3.5-mile-wide (6 km) swaths as the orbiter flies at about 7,800 mph between 155 and 196 miles (250 to 316 km) above Mars' surface. For at least the next 18 months, HiRISE will collect thousands of color, black-and-white and stereo images of the Martian surface, resolving features as small as 40 inches across, covering about one percent of the planet.
The team based at UA's HiRISE Operations Center (HiROC) began releasing selected images on the Internet when science operations began in November 2006. Team members began reprocessing all the images taken up to March 25, 2007, using improved calibration, or image correction techniques, in April.
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from University of Arizona, in Tucson, Jun 08, 2007
The preceding news links are provided as a public service for interested
users. The views and claims expressed in external internet sites are
not necessarily those of NASA.
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