NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been flying around the Red Planet for 20 years, sending back images of its surface captured by its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera.
This week, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which oversees Mars missions, shared the 100,000th image captured by HiRISE, publishing it alongside a selection of other Mars images captured by the camera over the past two decades.
You can see them in the post below.
The remarkable images include everything from impact craters and sand dunes to ice deposits and even potential landing sites for future manned missions. It’s worth noting that many HiRISE images do not show the expected reddish hue of Mars because color processing balances surface tones with the camera’s blue-green and infrared bands.
The 100,000th image we embedded at the top of this page was taken in October and shows mesas (flat hills or plateaus with steep sides) and dunes in Syrtis Major, a region about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of Jezero Crater that is currently being explored by NASA’s Perseverance rover.
Scientists are now analyzing the image to better understand the source of the wind-blown sand that settles into the region’s landscape and eventually forms dunes.
“HiRISE not only discovered how different the Martian surface is from Earth’s, it also showed us how that surface changes over time,” MRO project scientist Leslie Tamppari said on the space agency’s website, adding, “We saw dune fields marching with the wind and avalanches racing down steep slopes.”
The theme of the milestone image was suggested by a high school student through the HiWish website, where anyone can suggest parts of Mars to study.
“Rapid data releases as well as imaging targets proposed by the broader scientific community and the public have been a hallmark of HiRISE,” said the camera’s lead researcher, Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona in Tucson. “A hundred thousand images like this have made Mars more familiar and accessible to everyone.”
The MRO has enough fuel to support operations until the mid-2030s. So we can look forward to seeing many more stunning images from the spacecraft, giving scientists the opportunity to learn even more about the distant planet.
