Martian Anomalies

I finally spent some time locating, downloading, and correctly reading images from the HiRise instrument on the MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) from the Planetary Data System.  Usually always a pain, and this was no exception.  I think there are things out there to 'help' me get the data I want, but I'm old school and it's usually much easier for me to write some simple C code to extract the data from the calibrated datasets and then do what I want with it.

I can process these images the same as I do the LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter), although they're slightly different as far as dimensions go.  For one, they're all 546 pixels wide.  512 pixels are legit, with 18 at the beginning and 16 at the end used for other purposes.  The images can be pretty long.  The first one I downloaded was 25000 pixels long.  You can pack about 2700 64x64 subarrays into that size.  I've seen other images that are 35000 pixels long.  There's some variation in size, so I'm going to have to deal with that if I want to automate the data production.

Looking at MRO dataset ESP_065269_1695_BG12_0.  Data collected on 29 June 2020 at about 06:25 UTC.  I'm not sure what the pixel scale is.  I'd imagine pretty big compared to LRO resolution.

Wow check out those Martian cliffs!

Almost looks like a series of roads:

these are some very small portions of a 546 by 25000 pixel image.  Not quite I'm still playing with the software a little, but I'm getting what I'd call acceptable results at this point.  Here's the top 256 64x64 image sections.  The autoencoder seems to be working as advertised: The higher the ranking more different the images are from each other (i.e. 'Not Mars'); towards the end of the 256 they look almost all the same.  Looks like many of the 'not mars' images are shadows and sharp edges.  The dunes in the bottom ones are stunning.

Anyhow, now I have software and scripts that can deal with this data as well.  So I'll start to work with it a little and see what happens.  My primary focus is on lunar data, but I'd planned on adding Mars at some point.  Now seems to be the time.