30 years of looking at Mars

Monday, March 24, 2008 Subject: Views of Mars... Time: 9:24:00 AM EDT Author: stuartatk

Everyone who knows me knows how mad I am about space in general, and Mars in particular. Fair enough, hands up, I admit it, I'm a genuine "Mars nut", devouring each and every picture I can find of the Red Planet. My poor trusty computer's hard drive creaks under the weight of images taken by spaceprobes that have landed on or circled Mars. It puts its head in its hands and groans "Oh no…" everytime the word "phoenix" is mentioned near it, as it imagines how many more images it will have to store after the Phoenix probe lands in the martian arctic at the end of May.

But if it thought it had a couple of months' rest before then it was sadly mistaken, because last week, finally, FINALLY, after all these years of struggling with the online technology of The Old Ones, I stepped through the stargate and into the internet of the 21st century. I got broadband. And my view of Mars has been transformed.

How come? I hear you ask. Why should being on broadband make a difference? Now you can just download the same pictures as before, only quicker, right? Well, that's true; I can now download a 12Mb MER panorama or a "Planetary Radio" program in a few seconds, instead of setting it downloading while I go out to do some shopping. Or go on holiday. But that's not how the transformation has occurred. You see, being on broadband means I can now, finally, access what is possibly one of the most innovative, most useful and most addictive resources available online since the birth of the internet: the HiRISE IAS viewer.

Put simply, I can now see Mars as HiRISE sees it, boulder by boulder, stone by stone, dune by dune. Until I got broadband I could only see HiRISE images as they appeared on the screen. Impressive enough, but I wasn't able to see them at their highest, crispest resolution. Now tho, thanks to the Java platform IAS viewer, I can literally zoom in on martian craters, scarps, dunes and valleys like the 6 Million Dollar Man, picking out fine details that were hidden from me before. Just five minutes ago I was following the tracks of a boulder that had bounced and boinged down the inner slope of acrater, which doesn't sound that magical but somehow it is. It's like flying over Mars in a hang-glider…

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