"The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is Aperture’s hottest new photographer. The fine art publisher is presenting 152 carefully edited images in a new book out this fall titled, This Is Mars.
It’s a lavish book of eye-popping images from the telescope camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), called HiRISE. All the images are in black and white and consistently cover areas of the planet that are just over three miles across, with no enlarged segments included.
“This camera equals a naked-eye view of the planet at a flight level of approximately one kilometer,” says astrophysicist Francis Rocard. “All of the images in the book retain their original range, an editorial decision having been made to not present images that have been artificially zoomed.” Even so, the variety of surfaces represented can be overwhelming.
The MRO was launched in 2005 for the purpose of finding landing sites suitable for robots. The MRO was kitted out with a special camera, called HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) to send views of the Red Planet’s surface to scientists on earth. The camera sent out its first high-resolution image on Sept 29, 2006, a few months after reaching orbit. The camera has outperformed expectations — designed to withstand four years in Mars’s orbit, it has been sending back data to scientists for the past seven.
Researchers point out that it’s important to look at images of Mars in context — the images are richly detailed but show only limited areas. The images from the MRO are very high resolution, each one requires gigabytes of data even when compressed. Over 29,000 such images have been transmitted since 2006 — but they cover only 1.8 percent of the surface of the Red Planet.
“HiRISE has also contributed to better understanding of ‘middle-age’ Mars,” says Alfred S. McEwen, principle investigator on the HiRISE telescope. “A time after the heavy impact bombardment when surface activity was dominated by floods of lava and water. As for the present state of Mars, the images transmitted by the HiRISE camera allow the surface to be carefully observed, including sand dunes, new impact craters (some exposing clean-water ice), avalanches of dust, frost, ice, rocks and ravines, and many other curiosities, such as what may be small active flows of salty water.”
Images from MRO have helped scientist to find landing sites for the Phoenix and Curiosity rovers and chart safer paths for the Spirit and Opportunity. The HiRISE camera is also slowly revealing a natural history of the planet.
More of the planet can be seen on the HiRISE website, where visitors can also make suggestions for new images."
