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The following is a news release from NASA.
(NASA) - Take a tour of Mars as seen never before thanks to the UA's
HiRISE camera circling Mars.
Microsoft Research and NASA are
providing an entirely new experience to users of the WorldWide
Telescope, which will allow visitors to interact with and explore our
solar system like never before.
Viewers can now take exclusive
interactive tours of the red planet, hear directly from NASA
scientists, and view and explore the most complete, highest-resolution
coverage of Mars available.
To experience Mars up close,
Microsoft and NASA encourage viewers to download the new WWT|Mars
experience at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org.
Dan Fay, director of Microsoft Research's Earth, Energy and
Environment effort, works with scientists around the world to see how
technology can help solve their research challenges.
Since early
2009, he's been working with NASA to bring imagery from the agency's
Mars and Moon missions to life, and to make their valuable volumes of
information more accessible to the masses.
"We wanted to make
it easier for people everywhere, as well as scientists, to access
these unique and valuable images," says Fay. "NASA had the images and
they were open to new ways to share them. Through the WorldWide
Telescope we were able to build a user interface at WWT|Mars that would
allow people to take advantage of the great content they had."
To create the new Mars experience in the WorldWide Telescope, Fay
worked closely with Michael Broxton of the NASA Ames Research Center's
Intelligent Robotics Group (IRG).
Broxton leads a team in the
IRG informally called the Mapmakers, which applies computer vision and
image processing to problems of cartography.
Over the years, the
Mapmakers have taken satellite images from Mars, the moon and
elsewhere, and turned them into useful maps.
Broxton says that
getting the results of NASA's work out to the public is an important
part of his mission.
"NASA has a history of providing the
public with access to our spacecraft imagery," he says. "With projects
like the WorldWide Telescope, we're working to provide greater access
so that future generations of scientists can discover space in their
own way."
It is the mission of Fay's team at Microsoft to push
the boundaries of technology in service of scientific discovery and
advance the state of the art in computer science overall.
He
explains that the approach to the Mars WorldWide Telescope project was
to provide information at your fingertips.
As such, Fay says the
WorldWide Telescope is as much a research project as a Web service —
one that has resulted in a truly stellar experience for users.
"We were able to take the imagery from NASA, combine it with their
elevation models and lay those onto the surface of the globe of Mars,"
Fay says. "Now users of the WorldWide Telescope can zoom down and
actually experience the surface-level detail of Mars. They can pan back
and see the height of the craters or the depth of the canyons. The new
Mars experience allows people to feel as though they're actually
there."
In particular, there's a new dataset from the
University of Arizona's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment
(HiRISE), a state-of-the-art, remote-sensing camera on NASA's Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter.
HiRISE collects incredible images of
super high resolution — a quarter of a meter per pixel on average.
Each
HiRISE image is a gigapixel in size, containing 100 times as much
information as a 10 megapixel off-the-shelf camera.
"Due to
its size, the data set is too unwieldy for many people to work with,"
notes Fay. "But that large data set is necessary to provide the most
in-depth experience — the most beautiful images, which are full of
information. We needed this immense level of data to even begin to
attempt to create this unique Mars experience."
To get those
images out to the public in a new way, the team set an ambitious goal
to take all of the HiRISE images, 13,000 or so, and stitch them onto a
single coherent map.
While HiRISE has only imaged about 1
percent of Mars, leaving vast regions of Mars still to be explored, all
of the HiRISE images have now been geolocated on a single map, and
correlated with other global Mars data sets.
Dotted with HiRISE
images acquired so far, this new coherent map is the highest-resolution
map of Mars' surface ever constructed.
"Not only is it going
to be amazing for the general public to see, but it's actually
something that scientists have never been able to see before," Broxton
says. "This particular feat has never been attempted."
The
reason for that, he says, is the technical challenge behind the
project.
The resolution of the images is so high and the files so
large that NASA has been crunching the raw data for three years now.
For anyone who's ever tried to edit a picture from a digital camera
and had the computer spin on it for several seconds, multiply that by
100, or more.
And then multiply the number of images by 13,000.
Multiply the number of tasks by another dozen and you can begin to see
why the process has never been attempted.
Broxton leveraged
Nebula, NASA's high-performance computing cloud, to process the image
data.
In all, the HiRISE mosaic took 14 days to process on 114
CPUs and constitutes the entire collection that has been taken by the
orbiting camera as of May 2010.
"It's an indispensable
archive of information, but it's not very easy to access unless you
have an expertise in processing lots of data," Broxton says. "Nebula
allowed us to take the data, process it into a format appropriate for
the WorldWide Telescope, and then make the entire catalog of NASA's
Mars information available on desktops around the world through the
WorldWide Telescope."
The images themselves reside on the
Nebula cloud at the NASA Ames Research Center, near San José,
California.
Fay says hosting the data offsite is not a new
approach, but rather one that allows WorldWide Telescope to use imagery
from just about anyone.
Thanks to the magic of the cloud, other
imagery on the site is hosted at Microsoft datacenters around the
world.
Hubble's resides in Baltimore.
The California
Institute of Technology's is in Pasadena.
"Anyone can actually
put up their own astronomical images and view them through WorldWide
Telescope," says Fay. "We've worked with folks at several other
institutions to make their images available."
Retrieving
images from all over the world is as smooth as any experience on the
Web today.
The secret is a tiling system that uses the visitor's
desktop computer to process the imagery.
With such a huge amount
of information contained in one coherent tool, users are able to
browse and zoom into interesting locations as they please.
Visitors
to the WorldWide Telescope can now have the experience of flying
though a 3-D rendering of Victoria Crater and Olympus Mons — a low
valley and the highest peak in our solar system — and can experience
firsthand the extreme elevation and intricate features on the Martian
surface.
"We take advantage of the computing power you have on
your desktop to allow a smooth, 3-D experience," explains Fay. "As you
zoom in, it's a really constant view of these images. You can now get a
true sense for what the terrain looks like."
Broxton says
the 3-D effect is derived from information provided by an instrument
called MOLA, the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter, which measured altitude
along the surface of Mars from space from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor
orbiter.
The team also combined that information with a stereo
image-reconstruction process — taking two images from different angles
and using that to build a 3-D model of the terrain.
"These
images give you a particularly visceral impression of, for example, the
Mars Exploration Rover landing sites," Broxton says. "You can see what
it's like in the hills there or zoom into surface craters. It's really
amazing stuff."
For scientists and hardcore hobbyists, Fay's
team at Microsoft has developed another feature that puts the image in
the context of the mission from which it was collected.
Users
can right-click on some of the images and find their original Web pages
at NASA with additional details on the HiRISE project.
"So
it's not just the imagery, but bringing it together with the context,"
Fay says. "We think that capability will make this an exciting tool for
scientists and educators."
So what is the surface of Mars
like?
According to Broxton, part of what's striking about Mars
is its similarity to what we're used to here on Earth.
Mars
shares many of the same Aeolian (wind), tectonic, volcanic and even
water processes, the effects of which are visible on the planet's
surface.
"I often think of Mars as being a beautiful, barren,
sculpted desert much like the American Southwest," Broxton says. "On
earth, most of our craters have been erased because we have a much more
active tectonic and volcanic process, but aside from that, there's a
lot of similarity."
Back on Earth, Fay and his team are already
looking at ways to continue building the WorldWide Telescope as a
platform for advancing scientific learning, and a showcase for how
technology can help facilitate understanding.
He says that when
he recently showed the new features to his son, the importance of that
mission hit home.
"It gave my young son a sense of what the
space mission is about, and why we as a nation invest in it," he says.
"I think that people who look at this will be amazed by these images
and the detail of what these cameras can pick up. Seeing the solar
system spinning in time, the details of the Martian planet, you could
spend hours getting lost in space."
(Copyright 2010 by NASA.
All Rights Reserved.)
