Those who know me know that I'm an insatiable science geek. I always follow spaceflight news, and Mars has been especially rewarding in past years because of the number of high quality spacecraft that have orbited and roved the surface over the past few years. The picture below is a frame from the HIRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which arrived at Mars last year. The HIRISE camera, for those who have never heard of it, rivals the resolving capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope instruments. In short, it's the most sophisticated camera ever to turn its eyes downward, other than a few top secret military and intelligence satellites looking at Iraq and Afghanistan.
The HIRISE website is updated at least weekly, and currently contains many thousands of gigabytes of image data in extraordinarily high resolution, much of which has not even been closely examined by scientists yet. If you spend some time closely exploring some of this stuff, chances are you're looking at areas of Mars that have never before been seen by humans!
The site makes extensive use of a Java based image viewer that uses JPEG-2 technology. It's absolutely amazing. When you select an image to review (example here) and click on one of the JP2 Quicklook IAS Viewer links, it will download the viewer app to your desktop and load the selected image. There are quite a few zoom/flyover tools available, as well as some basic image manipulation tools like sharpen. Each image may be up to 2 gigs in size, but the viewer dynamically loads just what you need as you pan and zoom, so no huge downloads are needed.
I've spent quite a bit of time over the last few weeks playing with this site as its tools have evolved and been polished to their current state. The example image above is probably about a kilometer wide and shows a fluvial formation (possible water carved formations). The smallest details you can see are approximately the size of a pickup truck (boulders). The HIRISE camera is capable of resolving details on the surface of Mars as small as .2 meters (20 centimeters!), allowing scientists to count rocks!
Explore, have fun! |
