There are 3 views of the Moon from HiRISE posted up to the MRO page at nasa.gov:

Overview : http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/mult...-fullframe.html
blue-green color : http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/mult...a/pia08002.html
infrared : http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/mult...a/pia08004.html

Also, the official HiRISE page appears to have moved from University of Arizona to NASA/AMES (although they don't yet have any images available yet)

I guess since this image is showing up on nasa.gov first, we can now welcome MRO into the time honored NASA tradition of releasing news/data through as many different webpages as possible.

20000x6000 pixels

Oh my god. This is going to be a feast for the eye !

A full HiRISE frame is 6.6 times taller than that as well

Pity they didnt get the earth as well - that would have been astonishing.

Doug

While watching these images come down (hopefully they will release the omega Centauri images as well), I asked about why the Earth was considered. The problem is the atmosphere. These images are being used to test the focus mechanism on the camera and the make sure there is no...gunk on any of the optics (as has occured on a number of recent missions). omega centauri and the Moon offered clear, crisp targets that would make for rapid estimation of the point-spread function, whereas one would have to perform more work if Earth were chosen (to remove the effects of the atmosphere).

Still, that is a nice image of the moon, particularly from 10 million km away

Yeah, and this time it looks like the damn thing is actually in focus! Science marches on!

Whay not color?
Click to view attachment
I know, Moon is not very colorfull, but I combined IR (red), BG (blue) and average of the two (green chennel).. then I enhanced saturation.

http://www.msss.com/mro/ctx/images/2005/09/12/index.html

Hmmm - to me, the "Actual CTX" looks somewhat close to the simulated model, but dimmer, and Mare Crisium doesn't stand out nearly as much.

The image sample says that the "Actual CTX" is magnified - would the magnification cause it to appear dimmer, or was the real moon as imaged by the CTX just dimmer than the Clementine image (which was used as the source of the model)?

The Moon *is* dim - look how burnt out the Earth is on the MSS site!

Let me rephrase:

The simulated CTX image (middle) appears to have more detail than the actual CTX image (right). Is the simulated CTX image, which was based on the Clementine image (left), too bright to match reality?

This simulation is technically flawed for several reasons. First, obviously the Clementine dataset is much higher-resolution than the CTX image, and the process used to artificially degrade it (probably just Photoshop blurring) doesn't really reflect what the CTX optics really do. Second, the illumination conditions are very different, and in the CTX case lead to worse maria contrast than did the Clementine dataset.

A more realistic simulation could be done by taking the HiRISE image and degrading it down. I was working on that yesterday morning, but somebody else rushed the press release out before I finished.

So CTX is working fine. If I had it to do over again, I'd have imaged the Earth with a shorter line time on at least one of the slews, which would have made for a somewhat more interesting composite image. But the command sequence was defined several months ago, before we knew the launch date, and there was no way to predict the Earth's location in advance.

- Mike Caplinger, CTX Systems Engineer, MSSS

I figured something like that was going on.

Thanks for the clarification and your participation!

Ummm...So getting the moon was just luck? If you knew where the moon was, wouldn't you know where the earth is as well?

The command sequence (not including the pointing direction) was planned out before the launch date was known. The position of the Earth relative to the moon would vary depending on the launch date. Once launched, the spacecraft looked in the direction of the moon and executed the command sequence. Does it make more sense now?

It makes sense - if you don't like building public support for your mission. Given the size of the frame it wouldn't have been hard to pan for the Earth too, in such a way that it's bound to be captured.

However perhaps no-one thought in that "marketing" fashion when the sequence was designed.

Well - it would have meant writing another imaging sequence, probbaly using a bit more fuel to do another fast pitching manouver to do it.

I'd rather the time, money, and fuel were spent on taking more images at Mars

Doug

Since you're so brilliant, next time *you* can design the sequence.

The Earth *was* imaged by CTX, just not at the right exposure.

Given that the only way that the CTX exposure time can be reduced is to increase the line rate (that is, to reduce the exposure time by 4x you have to take data at 4x higher rate -- it's a linescan camera, not a framing camera) there is a direct relationship between the data volume and the angular coverage of the image. Because of buffer space limitations, the unknown relative timing of Earth-Moon in advance, and limits on the timing of back-to-back images, there was no way to manage the range of possible geometries and properly expose Earth and Moon without building the sequence post-launch (if then). And we were trying to minimize sequencing effort in inner cruise in case *real problems* came up.

And let's face it, even if it had been perfectly exposed it still wouldn't have been that great an image or gotten much attention.

There is a Point of Diminishing Returns where full-disk images of the Earth are concerned, beautiful though they are. (I still remember Stewart Brand using an entire article in "The Whole Earth Catalog" to solemnly proclaim that Galileo's upcoming color movie of Earth and Moon together might revolutionize world consciousness. Anyone remember that movie?) The trouble is that, at this point, everybody already knows what it looks like, dammit. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, once you've seen one Earth you've seen them all. Especially when the image is not very high-resolution.

Fair enough. My fake indignation crumbles in the face of your perfectly rational post. Thanks for taking the time to explain the technical framework. I'm excited by the quality of the moon picture anyway.

Some HiRISE documentation says that the "TDI line time" of that camera is >= 76 microseconds. Are the camera exposures tied to the spacecraft clock?

The high-precision spacecraft clock on MRO divides each second into 65536 parts, or 15.26 microseconds per tick. Five of those would be 76.3 microseconds, which fits pretty well with the stated HiRISE exposure time.

So the cameras, calibrated for the lighting/groundspeed conditions at Mars, wouldn't be suited to taking random astronomical photos.

The track velocity of MRO is slated to be about 3400 m/sec. So in 76 microseconds it would track about 25 cm. The ground sample distance for HiRISE is specced at 30 cm/pixel. Seems pretty well tuned for its main job.

Joe