Here is another question for the HiRISE-experts

Following the announcements on the Hi-blog about the continuously ongoing improvement of the HiRISE image processing chain I would like to know if processing improvements are also applied in retrospect to older image products, i.e. the images that were already published in the PDS catalog at the time when a new improved processing technique was introduced for the first time.

And if so, how could one know (from the image meta-data ?) if there is an improved version available for one particular older image. Is the whole catalog batch processed again through the new chain, or only selected ones of the older images or is it for the newly taken images?

The reason I ask is because I still have a large collection from older HiRISE JP2 full-resolution images that I downloaded a couple of years ago for further processing, colorization etc. and I am now wondering if I need to download them again in order to obtain the highest quality version available to date (*)....

Thanks in advance
Bernhard


(*) I know that due to the availablility of the IAS-Viewer (great software BTW !) it is not necessary to download full high-res images and it does always provide the most-up-to date version for convenient browsing.
Unfortunately, though, it does not seem possible to save detail crops in higher-than screen resolution or more than 8 bit dynamic-range precision which effectively limits detail images to 1600x1200x8bit resolution ... which is the reason why I do have to download full-res JP2s for the most quality-demanding post-processing .....

Not routinely. We've reprocessed many of the ESP images, went back to refine cal routines further, and are now reprocessing those again. When we have confidence, we'll go back and re-do PSP. The way you tell is the version number in the label file. I.e. version 2.0 for a 2nd release to the PDS catalog.

P.S. You might see some more info on twitter, (@HiRISE or e.g. http://twitter.com/RichardLeis/status/2110693170).

Also, so far as I know, very few 2.0 products have been released as of yet. In other words, reprocessing is completely decoupled from releasing.

Thanks a lot for the Info, GuyMac !

I'll just add a few points of clarification to Guy's post: No reprocessed (eg version 2) products have been released yet. As Guy notes, we have just begun to reprocess our data for the first time, starting with ESP data and we will be working backwards in time. The way to tell if a new version has been released is to check the PRODUCT_VERSION_ID field in the product label. All reprocessed products will have a version id of 2 (or higher as future reprocessing will certainly force new versions to be created), so that is the key thing to look for.

Also, we are reprocessing our extras (all the quicklooks and nomap files) however these files are not explicitly versioned like the standard products are, but you can always check the version of the corresponding standard product, since the extras are generally going to be reprocessed whenever the standard products are. We are not reprocessing the anaglyphs at this time. We may reprocess the anaglyphs at some point in the future, but there are no current plans to do so at the moment. Finally, we're not reprocessing the EDRs either. There will be a few version 2 EDRs that are the result of improvements in our data recovery mechanism, but there are no changes being made to the EDRs otherwise.

The first version 2 products will most likely start trickling out later this summer (assuming that the version 2 products validate well against the existing version 1 products).