NASA has just published more than one thousand high-resolution pictures of the surface of the Red Planet. These images have been captured by the HiRise camera installed in Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The HiRise camera has been taking the pictures of the Martian surface since 2005, and NASA has released many of these pictures in the past, but this time, the picture dump is huge, feminizing viewers with the craters, sand dunes, ice caps, and mountains of the planet.
According to Alfred McEwen, director of the Planetary Image Research Laboratory, MRO captured thousands of images and sent them to ground staff.
In every 26 months, MRO gets an opportunity to establish an unobstructed communication link with ground team as the Sun and Mars are on the opposite sides of the Earth. During this period, MRO can send huge amount of data to Earth. In May this year, the event coincided with the period when Sun was shining directly on the Martian equator, thus splashing light from north to South Pole and providing HiRise a better view of the Martian surface than usual. For the rest of the year, one of the poles is in constant darkness.
According to experts, the images captured by MRO will help NASA select the best landing sites for future Mars missions. The MRO is also constantly monitoring active processes happening on Martian surface, such as shifting of sand dunes, steep slope flows, impact events, and dry ice jets in the Polar Regions.
One of the images released by NASA shows a dune field (called Kolhar) in the North Pole, while another picture exhibits steep slopes of the Hebes Chasma. You can also see these images on the official website of HiRise.
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