NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is about to celebrate its 16th anniversary since being launched, and so far, it has already reshaped our understanding of the Red Planet. It’s designed to study the temperatures in Mars’ thin atmosphere and detects minerals on its surface. Some of its most important instruments include three cameras: the Mars Color Imager (MARCI), Context Camera (CTX) and the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE). Read more for a video, additional pictures and information.
HiRISE is capable of zooming in on surface features at the highest resolution, capturing other worldly scenes of tumbling avalanches, massive dust devils, and other bizarre features. Sometimes, these cameras even see other NASA spacecraft traversing Mars, like the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers. To date, just the HiRISE camera alone has captured over 6.8-million images, generating 195+ terabytes of data.
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Mars has a thin atmosphere – just 1% as dense as Earth’s. As a result, there’s less of a protective barrier to burn up space debris. That means larger meteors make it through the Red Planet’s atmosphere than Earth’s. CTX has detected over 800 new impact craters during MRO’s mission. After CTX spotted this one, scientists took a more detailed image with HiRISE,” said NASA.
