UA Team Heads for Launch of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and HiRISE

UA TEAM HEADS FOR LAUNCH OF MARS RECONNAISSANCE ORBITER AND HiRISE
From Lori Stiles, University Communications, 520-621-1877
Monday, August 01, 2005

***(Contact information is listed at end of news release.)***

NASA plans to launch a new orbiter called Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
(MRO)
on Aug. 10 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
leave for NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida next week 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.

---------------------------------------------------------
Contact Information
Alfred S. McEwen 520-621-4573
Eric Eliason 520-626-0764
Ingrid Daubar 520-626-0763
Christian Schaller 520-626-0767

Related Web sites
http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/