The Red Planet is simply incredible

New vision

Thousands of new images captured over the past few months by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have been released. These images show a wide range of gullies, dunes, craters, geological layering and other features on the Red Planet. This image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the Orbiter shows gullies near the edge of Hale crater on southern Mars. The view covers an area of about 1 km across.

Team effort

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the orbiter recorded these images from April to August this year. Each full image from HiRISE, released by the camera team at the University of Arizona, Tucson, covers a strip of Martian ground 6 km wide, about two to four times that long, showing details as small as 1 meter, across.

Advanced study

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been studying Mars with an advanced set of instruments since 2006. It has returned more data about the planet than all other past and current missions to Mars combined. It was launched August 12, 2005, and attained Martian orbit on March 10, 2006. In November 2006, after five months of aero-braking, it entered its final science orbit and began its primary science phase.

Successfully managed

The Orbiter is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA. Lockheed Martin Space Systems is the prime contractor for the project and built the spacecraft. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment is operated by the University of Arizona, Tucson, and the instrument was built by the Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.

The Hi-RISE camera

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera is a 0.5 m reflecting telescope; the largest ever carried on a deep space mission, and has a resolution of 1 microradian or 0.3 m from an altitude of 300 km. It collects images in three colour bands, 400 to 600 nm (blue-green), 550 to 850 nm (red) and 800 to 1,000 nm (near infrared).