LROC News System - Operations Journal

Rolling LRO

nospam@example.com (Christian Alf) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 11:36:00 -0600

Part 2 of Special Targeting: Obliques

Today we continue our tour of Special Targeting on the LROC Uplink team with obliques. An oblique view is any observation where LRO slews more than 30 degrees. A normal oblique for an LROC observation is 50-70 degrees. These obliques are different from our normal slews and extra special because of how much LRO has to move to acquire them. We are only allowed to take one of these every few weeks. When we do take them, they are a coordinated effort with the project and other instruments.

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Special Targeting

nospam@example.com (Christian Alf) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 16:21:00 -0600

Welcome to the exciting world of Special Targeting! My name is Christian Alf, and I will guide you through this special adventure. As a member of the LROC Operations Staff I work on the Uplink Team, for which Zack gave an introduction. One of the responsibilities of an uplinker is to plan special observations. Don't be fooled, we love each of our 600+ images we target a day, but we dedicate a lot more time to a few of them. Typically, these observations require moving the whole spacecraft, coordinating with other instruments, or crunching some numbers to ensure the viewing geometry is optimal. There are five main types of special targets: Geometric Stereo, Obliques, Limb Views, Earth Calibrations, and Ride-alongs with other instruments. Since we target geometric stereo at a higher frequency, lets talk about them first.

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Uplink - Commanding the Camera...

nospam@example.com (Zack Bowles) — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 13:02:00 -0600

Howdy! My name is Zack Bowles and I am one of the Uplink members of the LROC Operations team. Operations are mainly divided into Uplink and Downlink, with Uplink responsible for targeting images and generating command loads and Downlink is responsible for data integrity analysis and spacecraft/instrument monitoring. Uplink is also further subdivided into 2 components: Nominal and Special Targeting, with Nominal responsible for the majority of camera commanding while Special Targeting is responsible for planning slewed observations, calibrations, and any observation that requires coordination with the other LRO instruments.

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Introduction to LROC Down-link (DL) and Team Activities.

nospam@example.com (Tim Donnelly) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 10:51:42 -0600

Hello, my name is Tim Donnelly. As a member of the LROC Science Operations Center (SOC) I, along with two others, handle the Downlink duties of the SOC. As Shane Thompson posted earlier, the SOC has two teams - Up-link (UL) and Down-link (DL). UL plans the observation time-line for image acquisition, while DL is responsible for monitoring the LROC instrument health (via real-time and stored telemetry) and data processing (management & processing of all files delivered to the SOC from the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) Mission Operations Center (MOC)). Our two teams constitute the Operations Team to which Ernest Bowman-Cisneros referred in his post last week.

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A Look Back to the Beginning...

nospam@example.com (Ernest Bowman-Cisneros) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 11:11:00 -0600

Greetings, I am Ernest Bowman-Cisneros, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) Science Operations Center (SOC) manager. I have worn many hats during the lifetime of this project, but now that we have celebrated the second anniversary of the launch of LRO and nearly two years of operations, I can look back to the beginning of the LROC SOC.

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Web: News System Visually Enhanced

nospam@example.com () — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 07:00:00 -0700

In our continuing efforts to improve our website, we have visually enhanced our News System! Check out the new look for our new Featured Images and Announcements!

For our dedicated followers you will notice our News System has been subtly improved. We have updated the layout and styling so that it now closely matches the rest of the LROC website. The News System now features the standard LROC layout and LROC website colors. More importantly the News System dynamically utilizes our standard LROC navigation menu -- meaning you will maintain quick access to all of our resources even while you check out our newest featured image and read our latest announcements!

Into LROC's Science Operations Center (SOC)

nospam@example.com (Shane Thompson) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:33:00 -0600

Hello. My name is Shane Thompson and I am a lunatic. I am the Operations Lead for the LROC Operations Team at ASU for the Science Operations Center (SOC). I am an ASU alumni from the geology department and have been involved with lunar research for the last two years and Mars research for the last nine.

Daily operations for LROC at the SOC are carried out by four of eight Ops Team members who handle commanding the instrument and processing the downlinked data. There are two sides to operations: uplink and downlink. The uplink side creates the sequence of image commands in time order and validates them for optimal imaging as well as error checking with other spacecraft operations, and then sends the commands to Goddard Space Flight Center for uplink to the spacecraft. The downlink side handles acquired data products (both image and telemetry data) that are received, validated, processed, catalogued, and prepared for release. As an Ops Team member, I cycle through each of the four positions (2 uplink, 2 downlink). I get the experience of targeting the Moon for two weeks, which amounts to about 2200 images. It's a great feeling identifying targets and then seeing the images on the screen a day or two later! The next two weeks I am on the downlink shifts where I manage the processing of products and troubleshoot any problematic images. Then the cycle repeats. The benefit of rotating positions is being involved in all of the instrument's operational aspects. I am gaining great experience with not only spacecraft and instrument operations, but also computer skills from hardware configurations to shell scripting to database queries.

LROC is a high volume data collector. About 300-350 NAC images and 200-250 WAC images are acquired every day! That amounts to about 40-45 gigabytes per day!! Managing the processing of all these observations depends heavily on automation via scripts and a dependable database. During the commissioning phase (which just ended on September 15), there were many places within our procedures that had to be fine tuned. Now that the primary phase of the mission is upon us, we are ready to handle the fire-hose of data!

Predicting Imaging Conditions - The Temperature Model

nospam@example.com (Prasun Mahanti) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:23:00 -0600

Hi, my name is Prasun Mahanti and I am involved with temperature modeling for the LRO Narrow Angle Camera [NAC]. The NAC is a digital camera and uses semiconductor devices to take a picture similar to your own digital camera. As an example, when the NAC is looking at a mountain on the Moon, the image is recorded by a charge coupled device (CCD) instead of film. Semiconductors (here a CCD) are very temperature sensitive, so the noise characteristics of the returned image varies when the temperature goes up and down. Several of us in the LROC Science Operations Center therefore are tasked with forecasting the probable temperature of the NAC CCD a few days in advance. For a given temperature appropriate image acquisition commands can be sent to LRO for different positions around the Moon to insure the best-quality images.

My job is to build a thermal model using existing temperature records from the mission so far. The model is used to predict the future temperature of the NAC focal plane as the LRO takes images of the Moon. The fun part of this modeling is the uncertainty. We do not know for sure, but we try our best to mathematically model a physical phenomena and eventually, get closer to the truth. Knowing the imaging conditions makes it possible for the LRO NAC to take a much better image. So far we have always been very close in our estimates!

Producing NAC and WAC Mosaics

nospam@example.com (Steven Koeber) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:45:00 -0600

As a student researcher at LROC, I (Steven Koeber) mosaic images from the Narrow-Angle Cameras (NACs) and the Wide-Angle Camera (WAC). Mosaics are composed of several individual images that are stitched together, permitting an investigator to explore the geophysical and compositional properties of the lunar surface on a global or regional scale. NAC and WAC mosaics are produced using a specialized image-processing package called ISIS, the Integrated System for Imagers and Spectrometers. ISIS has the unique capability for processing data from several NASA spacecraft missions, including the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

Mosaics are processed in ISIS in four stages. The first stage prepares the individual images for processing in ISIS by adding ancillary information, such as the spacecraft’s altitude, time of observation, spacecraft location relative to the Moon and other pertinent data required to rectify an image. The second stage removes instrumental artifacts such as dust located on the camera CCD or bad (noisy) pixels to produce an “ideal” image of the surface.

The third stage simultaneously corrects for camera distortions and maps the image to a selected projection. A map projection displays the spherical surface of the Moon on a plane. Images obtained near the north or south poles are often mapped in a polar stereographic projection, while an image near the equator could be projected in simple cylindrical or Mercator projection.

In the final stage, ISIS generates a blank image that represents the regional or global area that all the individual images cover. Then those images are moved one-by-one into the “blank image” to create the final mosaic. Depending on the size and desirable resolution of the mosaic, the entire process can take only five minutes or several days. Providing the science team with quality mosaics of the Moon to analyze is my priority.

The Business Side of LROC

nospam@example.com (Carmen Salas) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:38:00 -0600

Hi, I am Carmen Salas, the Business Manager for LROC. My job is to ensure that all the business operation functions are in place. The business functions consist of Human Resource (payroll, hiring, termination, and unresolved issues); financial functions (research, local, and state accounts; report submission for ASU/NASA, reconciliation of accounts); proposal pre/post award submissions; education and public outreach (work with the EPO team on various projects); travel requests; and ensuring that all the students and staff comply with Arizona State policy and procedures.

Another part of my job is interacting with staff, postdoctoral associates, and students. This part of my job is the most fulfilling part of my position. I enjoy speaking with all of them and seeing their future endeavors come to light.

I will be leaving LROC this month to pursue my Masters in Business Administration degree. I will miss them all!

A Look into System Administration

nospam@example.com (Zach Gates) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:36:00 -0600

My name is Zach Gates and I am a Sophomore at ASU in the Computer Science program. I work on the LROC project as a student system administrator, which means I help our sys-admins create and maintain the computer systems our project needs to run. Working here at LROC is a great opportunity for me to learn more about my field through hands-on experience.

We have a number of computers at the LROC SOC (Science Operations Center); visitors will mostly see our collection of Mac and Linux workstations, which our staff use to perform their duties and communicate. Behind the scenes, we also have a number of Linux and BSD servers in several locations on campus; these handle the substantial computation needed to correctly process and store the data we receive from LRO. Keeping all of the software on these computers up-to-date and configured correctly is a big job, so we use tools, such as puppet, to automate the process as much as we can. Most of the software we use is free and open source, which makes maintenance much simpler because it removes concerns about payment and licensing.

Most of what I do at LROC is to help keep things running as smoothly as we can; this includes lots of inventory and documentation work, but also many interesting projects, such as developing software to keep our systems running in top-notch shape and helping users with any computer problems they come across.

Digital Elevation Models (DEM)

nospam@example.com (Tawny Tran) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:00:00 -0600

My name's Tawny, and I am one of the ASU undergraduate student workers at LROC. One of the many fun tasks I get to do is to produce Digital Elevation Models (DEM) of the lunar surface by using specialized hardware and software to extract elevation data on the Moon from stereo images. A DEM is like a digital version of an old-fashioned contour map and essentially provides the elevation of the surface for each pixel. For a pair of images to be stereo, it must show the same location on the Moon taken with different illumination conditions. Or, to put it another way, the relative angles of the Sun, the lunar surface, and the spacecraft have to be different for each picture while showing the same region.

Aboard LRO are two narrow-angle cameras (NACs). Both of the NAC cameras are fixed to the spacecraft, so they can't be moved independently. The only way for LROC to get a geometric stereo pair is to first collect an image looking straight down, and then on the next orbit, have the spacecraft tilt slightly so that the cameras point toward the same location imaged on the previous orbit. This gives us a geometric stereo pair, which consists of one image looking straight down and the other image looking from an angle. The diagram below demonstrates this technique. The off-nadir rolls interfere with the data collection of the other instruments, so LRO’s opportunities to do rolls like this are limited to only a handful of rolls per week, and the number of geometric stereo images collected by LROC will be limited.

Diagram of how LRO will take a stereo pair of images to be used to create DEMs [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

Once the stereo image pair is downlinked from LRO and processed, I use the SOCET SET software to extract 3D information. SOCET SET is a very specialized stereo-photogrammetric software suite. I give the program the stereo pair images, the NAC camera model, and spacecraft information such as the location of the spacecraft, the altitude, and the angle it’s turning. The program will then run a triangulation process, where it relates the image space to ground space. Before I run triangulation, I have to select several common points, telling the software where to find the same features in both images. If the program knows the angle from a known location (i.e. the spacecraft) to an arbitrary point on the moon for both images, then it can solve for the elevation. There’s a lot of trial-and-error in this process, and it takes quite some time to do it right. Once the program finishes triangulation with a low RMS error, I can then go ahead and extract the DEM. All of the hard work is worth it, because lunar scientists can use DEMs to provide such important information as “How steep is that mountain?” or ”How deep is that crater?” DEMs can also be used to create shaded relief maps and physical models of the lunar surface. DEMs are therefore incredibly useful as a tool to help scientists analyze the surface and terrain of the Moon to address important scientific questions and investigate potential sites for future human lunar exploration.

Currently, we are still calibrating the LROC instruments, so we are working on a preliminary version of the camera model to start using for SOCET SET analysis. Once that’s up and working, we will be able to make DEMs out of stereo pairs that we collect with the NAC cameras.

Experimental color shaded relief map of a crater near the Apollo 15 landing site, created using two images from the JSC/ASU Apollo Digital Image Archive Project [NASA/JSC/Arizona State University].

Journal Kick Off

nospam@example.com () — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 08:15:00 -0600

To kick off the launch of this journal, I'd like to offer up the first post in order to talk about its motivation and goals we hope to achieve...

My name is Andrew, and I am currently an undergraduate Industrial, Systems and Operations Engineering student at Arizona State University, where LROC operations are based. At LROC, I am currently employed as the web developer. This means I am the person who is primarily responsible for maintaining, developing and making updates and additions to the LROC website (as well as other websites for associated projects).

One of my most recent endeavors has been the creation of this journal. We are constantly striving to make the LROC website as appealing, informative, and useful as possible. One of the things we had always wanted to do was to keep an online journal of posts, straight from our staff, workers, and students, that chronicles our current activities and projects. Since LRO is safely in lunar orbit, we decided that it was time to begin!

It is our goal that this journal will serve as an interesting and important resource that gives aspiring students and the general public the opportunity to experience our operations and accomplishments as they unfold! As our mission continues, you will get to know each of us and what we do. Perhaps most importantly this journal will offer you a glimpse into what each of us has been doing individually to contribute to the success of LROC as LRO leads the way towards a human return to deep space!

So Students (and Teachers)...

Bookmark this link! Because you will want to check it out regularly!

This might be the first time for some of you checking out our website. We offer a lot of great information, tools, and other resources that you can utilize to follow up on LROC. Check out some of our coolest website features...

Of course, you can also always access any and all of our information and resources from the LROC Homepage.

Operations Journal Commissioning

nospam@example.com () — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 08:09:16 -0600

I would like to be the first to welcome you to our new LROC Operations Journal

So what is this journal all about?

This journal will receive regular postings from the LROC team. What do we do? How do we know what to image and when? What do we do with the images once they are on the ground? What is housekeeping data? And many other topics.

This means you will get to hear a little from everyone from time to time! Everyone from our scientists and specialists to our programmers, general staff, and student workers. You'll get to learn a little more about each of us in own words and how we contribute to the success of LROC!

But... We are focusing this journal to one of our key audiences... aspiring and interested students everywhere who want to learn more about NASA's current Moon mission!

Our posts will be more than just insights into our day-to-day operations... they will be personal insights that your typical elementary school student can understand and appreciate!

We sincerely hope that as this journal progresses that you will find it insightful, interesting, personal, and easy to understand!