Article Posted on : - Sep 07, 2009

The image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows gullies near the edge of Hale crater on southern Mars. Image credit: NASA

PASADENA (BNS): NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured over a thousand images of Mars, showing a wide-range of gullies, dunes, craters, geological layering and other features on the Red Planet.

The images were recorded by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on the orbiter for about five months from April to August this year, NASA said. The images are the result of more than 1,500 telescopic observations by the orbiter.

The camera team at the University of Arizona, Tucson, releases several featured images each week and periodically releases much larger sets of new images. Each full image from HiRISE covers a strip of Martian ground 6 kilometers wide, about two to four times that long, showing details as small as 1 meter, or yard, across.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been studying Mars with an advanced set of instruments since 2006, has provided several key data so far. The mission is on a quest to search for evidence of water on the Martian surface.