I make no bones about the fact that I love the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. With its 50 centimeter (18 inch) resolution, it’s returned one astonishing picture after another. I’ve picked several for my annual Top Ten Astronomy Pictures, too.

And now NASA has announced something incredibly cool: they are allowing the public to choose locations for HiRISE to image! It’s easy enough. Just go to their website, register, and then you can look at other suggested spots or suggest one yourself.

I suggested one myself: re-imaging a black pit on Mars that I featured in my Top Ten pictures of 2007:

This is a rimless pit, basically a cavern on Mars. I suggested they image it again at a different time of day, yielding three-dimensional information about it. The change in the Sun angle will allow scientists to see how steeply it’s sloped, where the rocks sit, and also possibly illuminate a different part of the pit walls. It would be very interesting to see if any of the rocks have changed as well, maybe settling downslope since the prior image was taken.

I hope they pick mine, but go there and pick your own. You can search the extensive (11,000+ images and counting) HiRISE archive for interesting things, or poke around the web. And yes, the Face has already been suggested though for some reason the person suggesting it didn’t mention the Face, and just said it was an erosional feature of interest. I think that’s pretty funny. Actually, lots of suggestion have been submitted for that region in Cydonia, unsurprisingly!

But there’s a lot of surface to map on Mars, so give it a shot. And if they do wind up picking yours, let me know! That’ll be worth a followup post.

Last week I participated in a three-day course on energy taught by Michael Webber at UTAustin. Very shortly, I’ll have more to say on the subject, but in the meantime, it’s a good opportunity to highlight an interesting new website from the National Academies called What You Need to Know About Energy. It’s a means to help visitors understand the ways we use energy, where it comes from, and how energy efficiency and alternative sources can figure into our energy future. The more we know, the better equipped we’ll be to engage in the ongoing debate about energy policy. Here are the details:

The site provides balanced and reliable information about our energy sources, uses, and options for the future. Take a quiz to see what you already know about energy. Explore “Our Energy System” for a quick and clear overview of the energy sources we depend on in the United States and how they are used, including what each source contributes to carbon dioxide emissions. Learn compelling facts about oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear energy, and renewable sources, such as solar and wind, including the pros and cons of each source. Compare a few cars and household appliances in “Understanding Efficiency” to see which use energy more effectively. Then rely on your new understanding of the energy situation as you make decisions about energy in your daily life, or participate in discussions about our nation’s energy options for the future.

The potential for brain injury on selected surfaces used by cheerleaders.