Nasa selects UA researchers to develop camera, which will be launched in 2005

RANDY METCALF/Arizona Daily Wildcat

Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for the HiRISE project, stands near the Mars Garden in the Space Sciences building yesterday afternoon. The rocks in the garden represent the type of material the HiRISE camera will photograph once it is launched to Mars in August of 2005.

NASA has selected a UA-driven project to create an ultra-high resolution camera that will be launched to Mars by August 2005.

The camera, known as HiRISE, will be carried on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and will be used to study Martian landscapes at 25 cm resolution - a power high enough to study rocks the size of footballs or soccer balls from the camera's orbit around Mars, said Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for the project.

"The primary motivation for this (high detail) is for choosing future landing sites - those that are promising scientifically, and which are also safe," he said.

Entire rover paths will be mapped out in advance via HiRISE. The rovers could be driven by astronauts within 20 years, McEwen predicts.

Not only will HiRISE give detail at unprecedented resolutions, some of the camera's images will show both 3D and color.

"While the current images would let us see an SUV on Mars, HiRISE would let us identify the model," said Laszlo Keszthelyi, research associate and co-investigator on HiRISE.

In the past, McEwen said image scientists had to choose between high detail with a small area and a large area with low detail.

HiRISE will document in high detail about 1 percent of the entire Martian surface, or about 560,000 square miles - roughly the size of Alaska.

"We will have our cake and eat it, too," McEwen said.

As HiRISE orbits Mars, technological advances will enable it to create 40,000 by 20,000 pixel images of the craters, mountains - and possibly life.

"If you were on Mars, we could see you in a HiRISE picture," Keszthelyi said.

The project will focus on involving the general public in both camera targeting and data analysis. Scientists have described HiRISE as the "people's camera" because anybody who wishes may submit documented suggestions about where they think the camera should film, McEwen said.

Access to the images will be available on large screens at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. The images will also be uploaded to the Web within days or weeks.

McEwen said he expects that information returned from the orbiter will be up to 20 times more than that of the Mars Global Surveyor orbiting the Red Planet.

Though the team has almost four years before HiRISE is launched, the scientists on the project said they are working diligently with no projections of slowing down before the launch.

"We still have to build it," McEwen said.

Besides HiRISE, the orbiter will be carrying a high-resolution spectrometer, a sub-surface sounding radar and experiments replicating those lost on the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999.

For more information: http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~mcewen/HiRISE