Its 15th anniversary since launch has provided one of the oldest spacecraft on the Red Planet with glimpses of dust devils, avalanches, and more.
Since the Earth left Earth 15 years ago, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has reshaped our understanding of the Red Planet. The veteran spacecraft studies temperatures in the thin atmosphere of Mars, peers underground with radar, and detects minerals on the planet’s surface. But perhaps it is where the most famous of words become beautiful images.
Among its instruments, MRO has three cameras: The Mars Color Imager (MARCI) has a fisheye lens that produces a daily global view. The context camera (CTX) delivers black-and-white terrain photos 19 kilometers wide (30 kilometers wide). These images in turn provide context for the straight-laced images provided by MRO’s third camera, the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), which produces the most striking views.
Able to zoom in on surface features at the highest resolution, the detailed color imagery of HiRISE captures dramatic scenes of nature: tumbling avalanches, cloud-scraping dust devils, and other features of a changing landscape. The camera also provided images of other NASA spacecraft on Mars, such as the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers. MRO has even turned itself in to point out HiRISE on Earth and Phobos, one of Mars’ two moons.
As of early August, HiRISE had taken only 6,882,204 images, generating 194 terabytes of data sent from Mars since 2006. The following images are just a glimpse of the amazing work done by all three cameras on board MRO, which is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Welcome to Mars
Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
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Dust storms are routine on Mars. Most are limited to small regions and are not as dramatic as what is depicted in movies. But once or twice a decade, a series of regional storms will create a domino effect, raising enough dust for wind to cover the surface in what is called a “planet-encircling dust event.” This one, captured by MARCI in the summer of 2018, darkened the region above the Opportunity rover, dismantled its solar panels from sunlight and eventually led to the end of the mission.
In Martian Sky Scraper
Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Arizona
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While HiRISE pledges over large swaths of the surface of Mars, it occasionally discovers surprises such as this emerging dust devil, which was captured 297 kilometers (297 kilometers) above the ground. 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.
Avalanche Alert
Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona
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HiRISE has brought avalanches into action. When seasonal ice evaporated in the spring, these 1,640-foot (500-meter-high) cliffs began to crumble at the North Pole of Mars. Such cliffs discover the deepest time scales on the planet, exposing the many layers of ice and dust that have settled over different time periods. Like the rings of a tree, each layer has a story to tell scientists about how the environment changed.
That will go to leave a dent
Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Arizona
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Mars has a thin atmosphere – just 1% as close as Earth. As a result, there is less of a protective barrier to burning up space debris. This means that larger meteors make it through the atmosphere of the Red Planet than the Earth. CTX has discovered more than 800 new impact craters during MRO’s mission. After CTX detected this, scientists took a more detailed picture with HiRISE.
The crater spans about 100 feet (30 meters) in diameter and is surrounded by a large, radiated explosion zone. By studying the distribution of ejecta – the waste thrown out during the formation of a crater – scientists can learn more about the impact event. The explosion that made this crater threw ejecta up to 15.3 miles (15 kilometers).
The face of time
Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona
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Land changes over time, so having a spaceship on Mars for years offers a unique perspective. “The more we see, the more we discover,” said Leslie Tamppari, MRO’s deputy project scientist at JPL. “Before MRO, it was not clear what really changed on Mars, if anything. We thought the atmosphere was so thin that there was almost no sand motion and most dune motion happened in the ancient past.”
We now know that this is not the case. “False color” has been added to this image to accentuate certain details, such as the tops of dunes and wrinkles. Many of these landforms migrate as they do on Earth: sand grains by sand grains, they are carried by wind, and millionaire years creep across the planet.
Back Atcha, Earth
Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Arizona
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MRO has not only looked at Mars. This composition, made up of four sets of HiRISE images of Earth and our Moon, was actually the second time that HiRISE had conquered our home planet.
Fearsome Moon
Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona
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Named for the Greek god of fear, Phobos is one of Mars’ two moons (Deimos, named for the god of fear, is the other), and it is only about 13 miles (21 kilometers) left. Stickney Crater, the impression on the right side of the moon, is approximately 5.6 miles (9 kilometers) wide in this HiRISE image. Despite its small size, Phobos is of great importance to scientists: Is it a captive asteroid, like a chunk of Mars that breaks after a massive impact? A Japanese mission is planned to launch to Phobos in the near future, and the moon is proposed as a stage for astronauts before they go to Mars.
Mapmaker’s tool
Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
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Based on a CTX image, this map shows the full traverse of the Opportunity rover after exploring the planet for more than 15 years. Both HiRISE and CTX are used by scientists to map landing sites for future human and robotic missions, as well as to map the progress of robbers on the ground.
Make moves
Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona
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HiRISE is often used to capture images of NASA spacecraft on the Martian surface, to capture Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity, such as the stationary lands Phoenix and InSight. NASA’s newest rover, Perseverance, is currently on its way to Jezero Crater. After it arrives on February 18, 2021, you can bet there will be some images of it as well.
The eyes have it
Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Arizona
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It takes keen eyes to find unique features on Mars, such as recurring tilt lines. These dark stripes appear in the same places around the same times of the year. It was initially suggested that they were caused by brine, because salt water could remain liquid in the thin Martian atmosphere. The consensus now, however, is that they are actually caused by dark sand sliding down slopes.
The regions were discovered by Lujendra Ojha, who was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, who operates the HiRISE camera, and is now a professor at Rutgers University. “Sometimes you just look in the right place at the right moment,” Ojha said. “I was completely confused when I first discovered this, because I was just a student at the time – I was not even in a planetary program.” Students work alongside experienced scientists to find unique features like these in HiRISE images.
Want to see more? Scientists and the public can request specific types of MRO images.
For more information on MRO:
https://mars.nasa.gov/mro/
www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/main/index.html
JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the MRO mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colorado. MARCI and the Context Camera were both built and operated by Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego.
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