WASHINGTON, August 2 (States News Service) -- The camera aboard a NASA orbiter circling Mars recently captured striking images of a portion of the Red Planets surface -- by mistake.

The images of a trough near the Sirenum Fossae show a part of the planets southern hemisphere in early autumn. There is also a shallow crater next to the trough in the pictures.

Most interesting, though, is that NASAs Mars team did not intend to photograph the trough. The Mars Orbiter Camera orbits the planet 12 times daily aboard Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, taking photographs of carefully selected features on the surface of Mars.

In between shots of pre-selected features, the camera will take a few randomly selected images of whatever it happens to be flying over at the time. The camera randomly took these images of the trough in between the scheduled pictures.

Malin Space Science Systems, the company that designed and built the Mars Orbiter Camera, said in a statement that the pictures are even more impressive because of the high quality of the images.

The cameras high-resolution view covers an area that is 0.7 miles (1.1 kilometers) wide by 1.4 miles (2.3 kilometers) long. That relatively small view area makes photographing large features like the trough challenging.