More Updates:

Political Notebook: Grijalva for Interior Secretary?Obama economic plan aims for 2.5M new jobs by 2011Sundt Construction plans new Tucson office on NW sideTucson weekend: Tequila, the 'Man Show' guy and a worthy benefitMerry Fitzmas! It's the Obama Claus ornamentFamily outraged, distraught over teen’s Internet suicideOhio police think they've nabbed 'Granny Robber'Tucson police radar van locations this weekendTucson gas-price tracker: StarNet helps you save at the pumpBritish may ban 'happy hour' as drink deaths riseIs Alaska big enough for celebrity Palin?Ga. Army wife accused in arson that killed her 2 kidsJimmy Connors arrested in Santa Barbara

Related articles:

Photo of apparent Martian landslide a surprise

Other articles by Dan Sorenson:

Jobless insurance checks lag hereBeaudry RV Co. files for Chapter 11Midtown Tucson shop sells China's finest, which isn't always easy to findBeware of liquidation salesCaution key for Tucson shoppers going in to going-out-of-business salesEEOC: University of Phoenix engaged in discriminationUnion workers at Qwest OK 4-year contractTucson manufacturing continues decline with Pella plant layoffsPella idling Tucson window plant ROAD TEST: Vectrix VX-1

Dental
Apache Dental
Porcelain Techs General
Prestige Maintenance USA
Area Manager General
GROUNDS CONTROL
LANDCAPE FOREMAN & LABORERS Retail
TOTAL WINE & MORE
WINE TEAM MEMBERS, CASHIER & STOCK MEMEBERS Technical
Yavapai College
Analyst Banner Programmer Education
Yavapai College
Teachers Health Care
SOUTHERN ARIZONA ENDODONTICS I
NSURANCE PROCESSOR

There may not be life on Mars, but there’s action.

The first photo of wait appears to be a landslide on a steep Martian slope was caught by accident at the University of Arizona when an employee was routinely examining photos from the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) camera.

“I was looking at the image just to see if it was OK. I happened to see a puff of dust. I said, “Is that a landslide or just a low cloud?

“Honestly, my first response was, “What is that?,”” said Ingrid Daubar Spitale, the uplink operations lead on the HiRISE imaging team at the UA’s Lunar & Planetary Laboratory.

A UA team designed and operates the digital camera photographing Mars from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. UA LPL scientist, Alfred McEwen, is the principal investigator — the lead scientist — on the project.

The camera had just come out of a “safe mode,” McEwen said, something it does after an apparent error or malfunction. He said one detector on the camera sometimes “acts up” after being turned back on and the image was being checked for signs of that malfunction.

McEwen said experts still aren’t absolutely sure what they area seeing is a landslide. He said it’s possible, though less likely, that it’s the results of wind stirring up dust. Something known to happen on Mars.

But he said a team member working in Switzerland has been studying ice blocks on Mars and the thinking is that a ice block may have broken loose and caused the avalanche.

Images taken from the orbiter by the HiRISE camera are sent back to Earth as radio signals, received by giant dish antennae in the Mojave Desert, Spain and Australia and relayed to the UA, where they are examined. But the images may sit for a long time before they are fully examined.

Spitale said the image covers a much larger strip of land — roughly 4 miles wide by 40 miles long — than the landslide area. The point of the photo was actually in another section of the image, where scientists were looking for seasonal changes in the carbon dioxide frost.

She said the blurry cloud, which appears to be dust hanging in the atmosphere above the slide area, suggests it must have happened just before the picture was taken.

Although the CCD digital camera that is the heart of HiRISE isn’t exactly comparable to a common digital camera, she said the effective shutter speed was very fast.

As the orbiter flies roughly 200 miles above the surface of Mars in a polar orbit (from pole to pole, rather than equatorially), the effective “shutter speed” is varied to compensate for the motion of the orbiter. “Instead of opening and closing a shutter (as on a traditional camera), we have a line of (light) detectors, we gather light line by line,” Spitale said.

The false color image was made using three filters on the camera — red, blue/green and near infrared, Spitale said.

“You can’t really see the full range of colors you’d see with your eyes, but it gives you a sense of composition — what it’s made up of,” Spitale said.

“We were just checking the camera making sure everything was working right,” Spitale said. “It was chance.”

In fact, McEwen said, there could be other exciting details in the hundreds of images taken by HiRISE, but not yet thoroughly examined by scientists.

The HiRISE team uplinks (transmits) computer-style commands through the Deep Space Network to the orbiter and HiRISE to tell it what to photograph and how to do it.

Later, the photographs are downlinked to Tucson, where they are examined by technicians and scientists, and posted to the UA’s and NASA’s HiRISE Web sites.

McEwen said the team doesn’t “have enough eyes” to examine all the HiRISE photos in detail. So, it could have been a fourth-grade class that found the landslide.