APL-Built Mineral-Mapping Imager Begins Mission at Mars
JHU/APL
For Immediate Release
September 27, 2006

See also A.J.S. Rayl's story at TPS.

EDIT: I changed the topic title because, as I understand it from the press release, the cover was opened, not jettisoned.

woohoo!

Vis/Near-IR spectra at roughly THEMIS Vis (~17 m) spatial resolution. This will be an awesome mission. I'm psyched to see the first results.

There are too many cool things with MRO

As pointed out by Rakhir in another thread:

New Spectrometer Begins Its Global Map of Mars
September 29, 2006

I'm starting this thread as a respository for all things CRISM I'll merge the other thread dealing with CRISM's cover succesfully opening with this one.

And as Doug first glogged yesterday, CRISM has released its "First 'Targeted' Observation of Mars."

Given the silence of late from the CRISM folks at Johns Hopkins APL, might it be worthwhile to contact some of the staff there to see what can be done to improve their public visibility.

Hopkins is a first rate school, (it hosts the Hubble STScI on its campus) and could get some good press if the folks at APL got their act together.

Steve

Processing CRISM data is enormously more complicated than for HiRISE. A major task is separating the true spectra of the Martian surface from atmospheric spectral contributions. It's the kind of thing they'll probably be refining for years in mathematical theories. That said, I agree that they should be making a greater effort to share their progress with the public, even if it means releasing only intermediate-stage data. A HiBlog style blog would be most welcome.

As monitorlizard noted, processing the CRISM spectra is vastly more different than providing web-ready HiRISE imagery. Note that TES and THEMIS IR releases lagged, too.

NASA-funded planetary science missions usually publish their initial results (traditionally in Science) 5-6 months after the data acquisition begins. I wouldn't be at all surprised if MRO follows the same path.

HiRISE is relatively easy to process compared to CRISM. HiRISE will eventually reach the point of releasing images as soon as the processing is complete, but that might still be a while. It should be among the fastest missions to release processed data in history. We just aren't quite there yet...

I don't have any inside knowledge, but I would bet that the first major appearance of CRISM findings will be in the 2007 Lunar & Planetary Science Conference abstacts, to be online late January or early February. Could be substantial, as abstacts can be two pages in length.

Abstact should be abstract. I guess if I were a pirate I would use rrrrrrrr more often.

As noted in today's AGU-related press release in the other thread, some CRISM data were released today (here and here).

Roughly how long does it take for water interacting with basalt to produce clay?

It varies a lot depending on climate. In wet tropical areas volcanic rock weathers to (incidentally quite fertile) clayey soils in a few centuries while on Iceland lavas that are more than 1,000 years old are still unvegetated and almost unweathered. Even under the warmest and wettest conditions conceivable on early Mars I would guess millenia would be required to create any appreciable amounts of clay.

tty

Correct me if I'm wrong ,Nili fossae like other fracture systems,seem to be associated with tectonic areas,in this case with Syrtis Major. Would it be right to assume that water flowing along this fracture system would have been water runoff associated with volcanic eruptions from Syrtis major?Certainly that would not mean that the presence of clay formations in this area would mean that there was an ongoing hydrological cycle on Mars!Right or wrong?I am assuming that volcanic eruptions were episodic and thus water flowing within the fractures would have been episodic rather than water pooling for long periods of time!Any comments regarding this matter would be much appreciated.

At the AGU meeting last week, CRISM PI Scott Murchie showed CRISM data from Nili Fossae and Mawrth Vallis, which confirm the OMEGA findings of clays, but at much higher spatial resolution. The real strength of CRISM is going to be the ability to correlate spectral features with distinct geologic units at ~20 m/pix. In addition Scott also showed ice-rich and ice-poor regions in the polar layered deposits. Team members Frank Seelos and Kim Seelos also presented posters showing data from the CRISM global coverage mode, focusing on the north polar cap and potential Phoenix landing sites. Not much to report in terms of composition there yet.

I wish CRISM would have released the Mawrth Vallis data, too. And I'm assuming CRISM's resolution is a little better than this

Actually its about the same as this

There was CRISM release today: PIA09101: Seasonal Frost in Terra Sirenum.

Should we be concerned about the noise in the green (1.45uM CO2 absorption) band?

Either it was a weak, therefore noisy, signal

or there are some instrumentation problems with CRISM .

Steve

Just a thought,

Could the problem be somehow related to the recent solar activity? And if it is, might it be a temporary problem?

There's probably nothing wrong with CRISM. You can't expect s/n ratios equal to framing cameras because spectrometers split the incoming light into a huge nuber of different wavelengths that are separately detected. The total energy per wavelength slice is thus reduced. There's also the way the spectrometers are built that they can be susceptible to noise (such as lower quantum efficiencies for certain wavelengths, ccd damage, etc). If you want to see what ugly data really looks like, take a look at Cassini's VIMS visual channel products.

A Fresh Crater Drills to Tharsis Bedrock
MRO CRISM Release
February 12 13, 2007

Note that the above release has been now delayed until tomorrow, though the link still works.

A Change in the Weather
MRO CRISM Release
February 15, 2007

Really beautiful images and a fascinating comparison.

Dune Field in Nili Patera
MRO CRISM Release
February 21, 2007

I'm slipping. I missed this general CRISM press release a few days ago: Mineral Mapper Marks 100 Days at Mars.

Olivine in the Southern Isidis Basin
MRO CRISM Release
February 23, 2007

A Cold Day in Richardson Crater
MRO CRISM Release
February 27, 2007

There are two more releases in March:

03-16-2007 South Polar Cryptic Terrain in Early Spring

03-27-2007 Defrosting of Russell Crater Dunes

There's also a nice gallery page.

Steve

Phyllosilicate and Olivine around a Fracture in Nili Fossae
MRO CRISM Release
May 18, 2007

The CRISM website (crism.jhuapl.edu) has a cool new feature called CRISM View that allows anyone to see where CRISM is over Mars in real time and what observations it is going to make next. Some of its features:

MRO Mars Ground Track, showing current postion over Mars
CRISM Information Table, showing current instrument settings
Next Scheduled CRISM Observations, a table covering the next few days
Current CRISM View
and more

CRISM View is updated every Sunday at midnight (probably Eastern time)

To run this, you have to install Java 2 Runtime Environment 1.5 (14.2 MB) and Java 3D 1.4 (2.76MB).
This is for PC/Windows. These are available at the CRISM website.

CRISM Mulitspectral Map of Eastern Candor Chasma
MRO CRISM Release
June 11, 2007

Well, thanks for that. Congratulations to the team who coded the viewer!

I'm still working this out, but is that real-time data or just displayed running from the spice kernels and related data ?

Alexblackwell, that's a very nice multi spectral map.

Will the colour and multi spectral image strips be displayed in a gallery format like the HiRise images ?

MouseOnMars

CRISM Data Available on NASA’s Online Archive
June 27, 2007

This interface appears to include Web access to CTX images too

--Emily

And I've just seen that the Marsoweb landing site site has CTX images as well.

too

much


data




Doug

For those who don't have access to the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets, the recent paper in the Special Collection - Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission and Science Investigations by Murchie et al. describing the CRISM instrument is available here (3.1 Mb PDF reprint).

I just did some browsing at The PDS Search Page and found the following maps of CRISM data from Gusev and Meridiani areas. Those of you who feel like diving into multispectral data, might find something worth looking at in the neighborhood of Spirit and Opportunity.

Click to view attachmentClick to view attachment

Steve

Are the red dots spurious noise in the data, or do they actually indicate some radical difference in surface composition? And if so, what does red really indicate in this context?

I have to say, from the looks of it, they look like noise to me. But I'd enjoy knowing, one way or the other.

-the other Doug

I think they're actually the locations of crism observations

Each will link (on the proper site) to the observation.

Doug

Pics look like laser topo models with the locations of the crism data superimposed.

Doug and Ed are right, these are just catalog maps of the CRISM data with the locations of the CRISM images superimposed on a shaded relief map. I should have been a bit clearer in my brief note.

If you look at the PDS Search Page you can zoom in even closer to resolve the pattern of the CRISM investigations. What intrigues me is the extent of coverage in the Gusev Hills and along what looks like the track of Opportunity running down to Victoria crater. None of this has made its way into the public discussion of the CRISM data.

Of course, I'd like to see what some of the geologists on board make of the data itself.

Steve

It turns out there are some recently published abstracts of studies of the CRISM data from Meridiani:
Initial Analyses of CRISM Data over Meridiani Planum.

and Gusev:
Initial Results from the MRO CRISM in ... Gusev Crater....
Possible Evidence for Iron Sulfates...at Gusev Crater....

From a quick look, they haven't yet looked in detail at the small scale geochemistry in the vicinity of the rovers that CRISM promises to unravel.

Steve

Nili Fossae in Natural Color and Across the Spectrum
MRO CRISM Release
September 11, 2007

They got it - CRISM of the MGS gullies.

http://crism.jhuapl.edu/gallery/featuredIm...amp;image_id=95

It's looking like dust slides.

Doug

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Is it over? I don't see how "Dust slides" per se answer questions relating to the face of slopes, which I believe tend to show a preference in terms of their bearing.

And if these slides were caused by liquid water, then that water would evaporate quickly from the scene. So the surface materials brought down by undermining and slip wouldn't have the chance to be modified by salts in the water, and might still chemically resemble dry surface materials from around the area...

Andy, needing more evidence one way or another.

So where are the salts?

Doug