This false-color image reveals rippling wind-blown dunes on Mars in 2009.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
This story is segment of Welcome to Mars, our sequence exploring the red planet.
NASA’s Mars rovers will most seemingly be glamorous attention-getters, but they be pleased got a quieter sibling in the martian skies.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) left Earth 15 years ago on Aug. 12. NASA well-known the anniversary this week by highlighting about a of the spacecraft’s finest photos of the red planet.
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Mars doesn’t be pleased the blues. About a of MRO’s photos appear in distinctly un-martian colours thanks to the usage of false color, a portray processing methodology that helps particular minute print stand out.
A gigantic meteor smacked into Mars and created this crater. MRO’s Context Camera instrument noticed this crater and NASA before all the pieces shared this HiRise image in 2014. The colours are processed to focus on the crater’s parts.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
This crater is 100 ft (30 meters) in diameter and is one of many impressive craters chanced on on Mars. The skinny martian ambiance doesn’t fritter away meteors the identical come Earth’s does.
MRO is geared up with three cameras. The Mars Color Imager takes fisheye photos, the Context Camera snaps the outside in gloomy and white and the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRise) delivers a lot of the knockout views we be pleased come to question from the orbiter.
MRO’s HiRise digicam caught this survey of a towering dust devil in 2012.
NASA/JPL/UArizona
This image of a dust devil on Mars comes from the HiRise digicam in 2012. It changed into mammoth. “The dimensions of this whirlwind’s shadow indicates that it changed into extra than 880 yards (800 meters) excessive — in regards to the size of the United Arab Emirate’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on Earth,” NASA talked about.
The MRO anniversary highlights assortment is ultimate-trying by and by, from a survey of Earth from a huge distance to a shot of a the minute moon Phobos.
MRO will most seemingly be one of the major oldest spacecraft at the red planet, but it no doubt isn’t always concerned about retirement. This is to extra years of ultimate-trying photos of Mars.
