NASA Releases Thousands of New Mars Images

Sep 5th in Space & Astronomy by Benjamin Grundy

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.

[HiRISE Full Catalog]

Tags: mars, nasa, orbiter

This entry was posted by Benjamin Grundy on Saturday, September 5th, 2009 at 17:52 pm and is filed under Space & Astronomy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Patrick Shettlesworth

Fantastic

Thomassie Mangiok

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.

agodofgame

now only if they found all of the underground oceans and rivers lol

Neil_R

Surprised at the range of colors. Amazing!

chadtropolis

Empty looking

jland

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.

gordon1984

well it's closer, and theres little to no atmosphere

paul

certainly blue skies - the whole exaggerated reds thing seems out in the open now.

dontbelieve

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.
EDIT: I forgot to add that the red skies are due to the red martian dust in the atmosphere.

Benjamin Grundy

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.

From what I understand many of the most attractive surface images are purposely false color shots so that certain features can be easily observed.

Mysterious Universe