This false color image shows rippling wind-blown dunes on Mars in 2009.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona
This story is part of Welcome to Mars, our series exploring the red planet.
NASA’s Mars robbers may be glamorous attention-getters, but they have a quieter sibling in the Martian skies.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) left Earth 15 years ago on August 12th. NASA celebrated this anniversary this week by highlighting some of the most beautiful images of the red planet’s spaceship.
Mars does not have the blues. Some of the images of MRO appear in distinct un-Martian colors thanks to the use of false color, an image processing technique that helps to distinguish certain details.
A large meteor crashed into Mars and made this crater. MRO’s Context Camera instrument found this crater and NASA originally shared this HiRise image in 2014. The colors are processed to highlight the features of the crater.
NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Arizona
This crater is 30 meters in diameter and is one of the many impressive craters found on Mars. The thin Martingale atmosphere does not burn meteors in the same way as Earth.
MRO is equipped with three cameras. The Mars Color Imager captures fisheye images, the context camera captures the surface in black and white, and the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRise) delivers most of the knockout views we expect from the orbiter.
MRO’s HiRise camera captured this view of a towering dust devil in 2012.
NASA / JPL / UArizona
This image of a dust devil on Mars comes from the HiRise camera in 2012. It was huge. “The length of the shadow of this whirlwind indicates that it was more than half a mile (800 meters) high – about the size of the Burj Khalifa of the United Arab Emirates, the tallest building on earth,” NASA said. .
The MRO Anniversary Jubilee Collection is beautiful through and through, from a view of Earth from a great distance to a shot of a small moon Phobos.
MRO is perhaps one of the oldest spaceships on the red planet, but it does not think of retirement. Here it is after several years of beautiful images of Mars.
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