New imagery
taken by NASA's Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter has been released, a sweeping gallery of red planet
photos - including Endurance
crater that NASA's Opportunity
rover explored for ten months.
The zoom
lens photo album comes courtesy of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's (MRO) High
Resolution Science Imaging Experiment (HiRISE).
Imagery
released today shows the landing site for the Opportunity Mars rover with its parachute resting
atop the Martian landscape [image],
the spacecraft's heat shield at a different spot [image],
and the airbag cushioned lander itself resting inside the floor of a small
impact feature - later dubbed Eagle Crater [image].
The HiRISE
camera takes images of 3.5-mile-wide (six-kilometer) swaths as the orbiter
flies at about 7,800 mph (12,552 kilometers per hour) between 155 and 196 miles
(250 to 316 kilometers) above the planet. The camera resolves geologic features
as small as 40 inches (101 centimeters) across.
Easy-to-find
hardware
That
sharpshooting skill will be put to good use in weeks to come, said Alfred
McEwen of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson.
Upcoming
targets are "all the easy-to-find hardware on Mars," McEwen noted in a press
statement. That includes the Spirit
rover -- Opportunity's sister ship investigating the Columbia
Hills - as well as the Viking 1
and Viking 2 landers that touched down in 1976, and the Mars
Pathfinder that landed in July 1997.
In October,
HiRISE was able to spot
the Opportunity rover shortly after the Mars machinery reached the large Victoria
Crater - an exploration site that the robot is presently studying [image].
MRO imagery
of Mars released today is the first of what is being billed as "a non-stop
flood of incredibly detailed Mars images" that are to be taken during the
spacecraft's two-year primary science mission. The orbiter is expected to
revolutionize our understanding of the red planet, as well as help discern safe
sites for future robotic and human missions to Mars.
MRO was launched
in August 2005. After a lengthy period of aerobraking
around the red planet - a technique used to slow the craft down and enter a
desired orbit - the spacecraft began its science
mapping mission earlier this month.
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