Jim Garvin, NASA Mars Exploration program scientist, detailed the key science strategy behind the new program. "We are first seeking the most compelling places from above, before moving to the surface to investigate Mars," he said.

In other words, there's nothing like a little distance learning before making huge leaps.

Mars experts point to MRO as offering great potential in making crucial new discoveries. Those findings should enable scientists to spot high-priority, rock-picking places on the planet, not only for robots to haul back the goods to Earth, but also to assist human crews in maximizing their scientific bounty.

"There are so many great places to get to on the surface of Mars and ask tough questions," Garvin said at an MRO meeting last month, here at NASA Headquarters.

"Essentially, we are talking about boosting ourselves into an entirely new domain of being able to visualize objects a few feet across. With MRO we'll actually see layers, features, and boulders you could run into and stub your toe on," Garvin told SPACE.com.

On arrival at Mars in March 2006, the MRO slips into an elliptical polar orbit. Following four to six months of aerobraking -- a fuel-saving maneuver that has the spacecraft dipping through the Martian atmosphere to alter its orbit -- MRO enters a 124 x 248 mile (200 x 400 kilometer) elliptical orbit.

Carefully finessed into place, MRO attains low-altitude access to all latitudes and longitudes around the planet. During the primary science mission, the orbiter is expected to target numbers of sites up-close with a suite of instruments.

"We're looking at each high resolution imaging campaign like a quick and dirty lander down to the surface. Say we image 1,000 places … it's like 1,000 landers," Garvin said.

The scale and clarity of MRO shutterbug photos should be more than eye-popping.

"Every picture becomes, if you will, a geological field trip. That's one of the many reasons why MRO is so vital to our program," Garvin said.