Tiles and Full Frame Images

I thought I’d go into a bit more into detail about what exactly you’re seeing when you review and classify an image on Planet Four.  On the main classification site we show you images from the HIRISE camera, the highest resolution camera ever sent to another planet.  Looking down from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, HiRISE is extremely powerful. It can resolve down to the size of a small card table on the surface of Mars. The camera is a push-broom style where it uses the motion of the spacecraft it is hitching a ride on to take the image. During the HiRISE exposure,  MRO moves 3 km/s along in its pole-to-pole orbit , which creates the length of the image such that you get long skinny image in the direction of MRO’s orbit. The camera can be tilted to the surface as well, which can enable stereo imaging.

The HiRISE images are too big to show the full high resolution version in a web browser at full size. The classification interface wouldn’t quickly load, as these files are  on the order of ~300 Mb! – way too big to email.  But the other reason is that the full extent of a HiRISE full frame image is too big and zoomed-out for a  human being to review and accurately see all the fan and blotches let alone map them. So to make it easier to see the surface detail and the sizes of the fans and blotches,  we divide the full frame images into bite-sized 840 x 648 pixel subimages that we call tiles.

An example Planet Four Tile

For the Season 2 and Season 3 monitoring campaign, a typical HiRISE image is associated with 36-635 tiles When you classify on the site, you’re mapping the fans and blotches in a tile. Each tile is reviewed by 30 or more independent volunteers, and we combine the classifications to identify the seasonal fans and blotches. To give some scale, for typical configurations of the HiRISE camera, a tile is approximately 321.4 m long and 416.6 m wide. The tiles are constructed so that that they overlap with their neighbors. A tile shares 100 pixels overlap in width and height with the right and bottom neighboring tiles.  This makes sure we don’t miss anything in the seams between tiles .

If you ever want to see the full frame HiRISE image for a tile you classified, favorited, or just stumbled upon on  Talk, there’s an easy way to do it. On the Talk page for each tile we have a link below the image called ‘View HiRISE image’ which will take you to the HiRISE team public webpage for the observation, which includes links to the full frame image we use to make tiles plus more (note= we use the color non-map projected image on Planet Four). Try out this example on Talk.

So next time you classify an image and recall how detailed it is, remember that although it’s just a small portion  of the observation, your classifications are hugely important. Without them we wouldn’t be able to study and understand everything that’s happening in the HiRISE observations. It’s only with the time and energy of the Planet Four volunteer community that we are able to map at such small scales and  individually identify the fans and blotches., which is crucial for the project’s science goals. So thank you for clicks!