HiRISE Camera Captures High-Resolution 3D Images of Mars
- From: baalke@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2008 13:54:33 -0800 (PST)
FROM: Lori Stiles (520-626-4402; lstiles@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)
HiRISE Camera Captures High-Resolution 3D Images of Mars
December 8, 2008
The High Resolution Science Imaging Experiment, or HiRISE, team based
at The
University of Arizona today released 362 three-dimensional images of
Mars taken
by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Other Mars-orbiting cameras have taken 3D views of Mars, but the
HiRISE camera
- the most powerful camera ever to orbit another planet - can resolve
features as small as one meter, or 40 inches, across.
"It's really remarkable to see Martian rocks and features on the scale
of a
person in 3D," said Alfred McEwen of UA's Lunar and Planetary
Laboratory,
HiRISE principal investigator. "The level of detail is just much, much
greater
than anything previously seen from orbit."
The 3D images, or anaglyphs, can be viewed on the HiRISE Web site
(http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/anaglyph) with inexpensive color filter
glasses
commonly used for viewing 3D images and movies. The HiRISE Web site
links to
information on where to purchase and how to make 3D red-cyan filter
glasses.
Without 3D glasses, the Mars images appear out of register.
(In Tucson, UA's Flandrau Science Center, 1601 E. University Blvd.,
and
Starizona, 5757 N. Oracle Road, sell red-cyan filter glasses for $2
each.)
Seen in HiRISE 3D, Mars becomes a collection of deep panoramic views
that leap
out from the computer screen.
"You'd swear you could touch the terrain," HiRISE operations manager
Eric
Eliason said.
Striking stereo views include:
* Sixty-meter tall, or 200-foot-tall fractured mounds, probably
composed of
solidified lava, on the southern edge of Elysium Planitia. The
fractured
surface suggests that lava pushed the surface into domes, uplifting
some sides
along the same fracture higher than others.
* Spectacular layers exposed on the floor about 2-and-a-half miles, or
4
kilometers, below the rim of Candor Chasma, which is a large canyon in
the
Valles Marineris system. The canyon may once have been filled to its
rim by
sedimentary layers of sand and dust-sized particles, but these have
since
eroded, leaving patterns of elongated hills and layered terrain that
has been
turned and folded in many angles and directions.
* Groups of gullies at different elevations along the wall of an
unnamed crater
in Terra Cimmeria. The anaglyph image provides three-dimensional
perspective on
the depth of the gullies and the amount of material deposited below
the gullies.
Geological evidence suggests that the gullies may have formed by
subsurface
water, rather than by snow or ice melting on the surface.
Other dramatic anaglyphs show a huge jumbled mass of rock that
includes
megabreccia at a central peak in Ritchey crater, ejecta-formed
channels and
mudflows at Hale crater, tightly folded rock layers lining the floor
of
Tithonium Chasm, "spiders" created by carbon dioxide venting through
south
polar layered deposits, and Martian glacier flows.
Eliason and the team at HiROC, the High Resolution Imaging Operations
Center on
the UA campus, began processing stereo images in October. They
automated some
of the software used in processing HiRISE images so two images of a
stereo pair
could be fed into the software "pipeline" and correlated
automatically.
"The real advance here is making this process semi-automated so we can
really
crank through all these huge images," McEwen said. Producing anaglyphs
from
stereo pairs is otherwise a tedious, time-consuming effort.
The HiRISE camera has so far taken 950 stereo image pairs. The camera
features a
half-meter, or 20-inch, diameter primary mirror and a focal plane
mechanism that
can acquire up to a 3.6 megapixel image in about 11 seconds.
The anaglyphs are among 1,642 observations containing 3.6 terabytes of
data and
148,000 image products that HiRISE released today to the Planetary
Data System,
or the PDS, the NASA mission data archive.
Since HiRISE began the science phase of its mission in November 2006,
the HiRISE
team has released a total 867,430 image products, or 30.2 terabytes of
data.
That is by far the greatest volume of data a space experiment has
delivered to
the PDS, and well more than twice the data volume some HiRISE team
members
expected to get during the primary science phase.
The HIRISE camera was designed to take images at high-convergence
angles so
researchers can calculate the thickness of surface features to within
about 10
inches, or 25 centimeters. High-convergence angles used to get
quantitative
measurements aren't always best for making anaglyphs, McEwen said.
In addition, if the two stereo images on two different orbits were
taken far
enough apart in time, the illumination or air opacity may have
changed, or
frost or dust devils may have appeared in one of the images, so paired
images
don't always match that well, he added.
"Nevertheless, many of these stereo anaglyphs are very interesting and
useful to
us in understanding the topography," McEwen said.
"There's a lot of science to be done by just looking at these directly
and
understanding what's up and what's down," he added. "Anaglyphs can
definitely
change how we interpret things, and help us focus on how to proceed
when it
comes to prioritizing some science tasks."
Binocular vision gives humans wearing 3D color glasses the ability to
see
anaglyphs in three dimensions the same way they see in three
dimensions through
a View-Master viewer or a Victorian-era stereoscope. The same scene is
viewed in
two pictures taken from slightly different angles. Each eye has its
own slightly
different view, which the brain fuses together into a single picture
with depth.
With the colored glasses, the red filter for the left eye sees only
red in the
picture, the cyan filter for the right eye sees only blue-green in the
picture,
and the brain correlates the images. The glasses work for viewing
stereo
pictures in print or on TV, movie and computer screens.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is managed by the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
Lockheed
Martin Space Systems of Denver built the spacecraft. The UA operates
the HiRISE
camera, built by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. of Boulder,
Colo.
SCIENCE CONTACTS:
Alfred McEwen (520-621-4573; mcewen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
Eric Eliason (520-626-0764; eeliason@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
WEB LINKS:
HiRISE: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu
MRO: http://www.nasa.gov/mro
.
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