This week NASA began releasing more than 1500 high resolution images taken from the HiRISE camera on their Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Each image covers a strip of Martian landscape 6 kilometers wide showing details as small as 1 meter across.
Continue reading for my favorites of the batch. Some of these are simply stunning!
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.
10 Comments
great photos.. though I have a question. Is day light on Mars the sames as the Earths, I would've though it wouldn't be a bright.
Empty looking
certainly blue skies – the whole exaggerated reds thing seems out in the open now.
Surprised at the range of colors. Amazing!
well it's closer, and theres little to no atmosphere
This is a nice post debunking the blue skies myth: http://artsnova.com/blog/2008/02/12/70/
Also, correct me if I am wrong, but most color pictures from space missions (at least as far as I know) are made by superimposing monochromatic images taken with red, green and blue filters, and then combined. Before superimposing, the red, green and blue channels are in grayscale, and thus the confusion that the images are colorized to whatever NASA engineers want, but in fact, the color/merged image shows the real coloration. The reason images are taken in grayscale is because monochromatic CCDs have better resolution than color, Also transmitting grayscale images is less resource intensive for the probes than color pictures.
Nice find DB (that's what I'm calling you now btw)
You can find all the different source images in the high rise catalog. I ended up grabbing the newest wallpapers (which are in RGB format) simply because they are the prettiest.
Many of the most attractive surface images are purposely false color shots so that certain features can be easily observed.
now only if they found all of the underground oceans and rivers lol
Now, would it not be nice to have an orbiter controlled by the public that we can tell which part of a planet or noon to take picture of and at which close up…? Now for those who wants to see the other side of the moon with their own eyes, this would be awesome.
Fantastic