Get Your Mars (and HiRISE) Fix With Over 600 New Images

By Nancy Atkinson - June 09, 2010 10:44 AM UTC | Planetary Science

Mmmm, Mars. And lots of it, too! The team from one of our all-time favorite scientific instruments, the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has just released a big batch of images taken from April 5 to May 6, 2010, and they are now available on NASA's Planetary Data System and on the HiRISE website. This includes over six hundred recent observations of the Mars landscape as seen from orbit, including scenes of sinuous gullies, geometrical ridges, steep cliffs, or these unusual dunes, above, in Desher Vallis.

Each of the 629 new images cover an area of several square miles on Mars and reveals details as small as desks.

HiRISE is made of awesome, and is one of six instruments on MRO,which reached Mars in 2006.

Source: JPL

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Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com