MRO
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NASA
NASA’s HiRISE Captures Perseverance Marking a Milestone on Mars
Description NASA’s Perseverance rover appears as a green speck on the Martian surface on June 13, 2026, a day before the robotic explorer marked a distance milestone, having traveled a full marathon (26.2 miles, or 42.195 kilometers) on the Red Planet. Perseverance reached that distance after five years and four months of driving — on the 1,890th Martian day, or…
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NASA
One of NASA’s Key Cameras Orbiting Mars Takes 100,000th Image
Mesas and dunes stand out in the view snapped by HiRISE, one of the imagers aboard the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. After nearly 20 years at the Red Planet, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has snapped its 100,000th image of the surface with its HiRISE camera. Short for High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, HiRISE is the instrument the mission relies…
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NASA
NASA Orbiter Shines New Light on Long-Running Martian Mystery
Results from an enhanced radar technique have demonstrated improvement to sub-surface observations of Mars. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has revisited and raised new questions about a mysterious feature buried beneath thousands of feet of ice at the Red Planet’s south pole. In a recent study, researchers conclude from data obtained using an innovative radar technique that an area on…
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NASA
Martian Barchan Dunes
On Jan. 16, 2020, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured this image of two types of sand dunes on Mars: barchan and linear dunes. The small dots are called barchan dunes, and from their shape we can tell that they are upwind. The downwind dunes are long and linear. These two types of dune each show the wind direction in different…
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NASA
Ice Flows on Mars
On Aug. 18, 2023, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured ridged lines carved onto Mars’ landscape by the gradual movement of ice. While surface ice deposits are mostly limited to Mars’ polar caps, these patterns appear in many non-polar Martian regions. As ice flows downhill, rock and soil are plucked from the surrounding landscape and ferried along the flowing ice surface and within the…
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NASA
A Bear on Mars?
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured this bit of ursine pareidolia on Dec. 12, 2022. While it resembles a bear we might see on Earth, this is actually a hill on Mars with a peculiar shape. A V-shaped collapse structure makes the nose, two craters form the eyes, and a circular fracture pattern shapes the head. The circular fracture pattern might be…
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