Mars Odyssey Mission
THEMIS
THEMIS lets you find your place on Mars
Arizona State University researchers and scientists have created two
new features for Google Earth 5.0, the popular online application that
lets users tour Earth, the starry sky, and the Red Planet Mars.
The first of the new features lets anyone, anywhere, recommend places
on Mars to photograph with ASU's THEMIS camera on NASA's Mars Odyssey
orbiter. The second new feature shows the most recent infrared images
of Mars sent back to Earth from the THEMIS camera.
THEMIS is the Thermal Emission Imaging System, a multiband infrared and
visual camera designed at ASU by Dr. Philip Christensen. A Regents'
Professor of Geological Sciences in the School of Earth and Space
Exploration, Christensen is THEMIS' principal investigator and also
director of the Mars Space Flight Facility on the Tempe campus.
"These two features, developed by our staff in cooperation with
programmers at Google, will help everyone have a lot more fun exploring
the Red Planet," says Christensen. "It's public engagement at its best."
Hey Mars, say cheese!
"We wanted to give the general public a way to suggest places on Mars
for THEMIS to photograph," says Christensen. "Using the new feature,
people can recommend sites, and these recommendations go to mission
scientists who will decide what areas THEMIS images. If a public
suggestion matches what the researchers choose, we'll notify the person
who suggested the site and let them see the image as soon as we do."
To suggest a place for THEMIS to photograph, viewers need two things:
Google Earth 5.0 and a file that is updated each week giving the
spacecraft's Mars orbital groundtrack. Google Earth 5.0 is available at
http://earth.google.com.
To get the orbital track, users should go to
http://suggest.mars.asu.edu and follow the simple steps to register.
Registering takes users to a page to download the orbital track file
and it also lets them make image suggestions without having to enter an
e-mail address with each image suggestion.
Registering also creates a customized page where users can see their
past image suggestions and find links to their successful ones.
With the orbital track file downloaded, viewers start Google Earth and
switch the globe to Mars (via the Planets toolbar button, which
resembles the planet Saturn). Then viewers open the orbital track file
from within Google Earth. Viewers can also just double-click on the
orbital file once Google Earth has been set to Mars as its planet.
The places where THEMIS can take images during the coming week appear
as stripes wrapped onto the Martian globe. Viewers click on stripe
segments to recommend places for THEMIS to photograph.
"Each viewer can make up to 10 imaging suggestions per week," says
Christian Yates, software engineer at the Mars Space Flight Facility.
Yates designed the online interface for the project. If a site picked
by a member of the public matches one chosen by the mission scientists,
the suggester will be sent a link providing access to the image after
it has come from the spacecraft.
Says Yates, "Making 10 image selections a week, a typical viewer will
probably get at least one image."
THEMIS takes images at both visual and infrared wavelengths; viewers
using Suggest an Image are making recommendations for visual images.
These have higher resolutions than THEMIS' infrared ones: 60 feet (18
meters) per pixel versus 330 feet (100 m) per pixel for infrared.
"Taking pictures with an orbiting satellite can be a complicated
business, but this tool makes it much easier," says Eric Engle,
scientific software engineer at the Mars Space Flight Facility and lead
project developer for the ASU team. "We hope people enjoy this chance
to participate with us in exploring Mars."
Live from Mars
The ASU team also developed, with Google's programmers, a second new
Google Earth feature called Live From Mars. It shows the latest
infrared images from THEMIS as soon as the mission team at ASU receives
them; look for the new feature among the Mars Gallery layers in Google
Earth 5.0.
When the layer is clicked on, viewers see the Martian globe with the
most recent THEMIS infrared images displayed on the surface, each
flagged with a square symbol. Viewers can zoom in on each image to see
details more clearly.
Mousing over the square symbol brings up the image's identification
number, and clicking on the symbol opens a bubble window with more
information (such as latitude and longitude, and date and time the
photo was taken). The bubble also has links to the THEMIS camera site
at ASU and NASA's Mars Odyssey site.
THEMIS' designer Christensen notes that both new features let the
general public look over the shoulder of Mars researchers — and Suggest
an Image in particular offers a potentially unique reward:
"Because the coverage of Mars by THEMIS at visual wavelengths is by no
means complete," Christensen says, "some people who recommend an image
target could be the first humans ever to see that particular place in
such detail."
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