Posted by tourdemars to Mars Global Surveyor at March 15, 2002 12:00 PM

For three years, Ken Edgett & Mike Malin have each spent as much as 80 hours a week staring at new images (more than 100,000 so far) gathered by a gadget called MOC, for Mars Orbiter Camera, which has been circling the planet since 1997 aboard the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. The camera, which Malin designed and built for NASA, is a technical triumph that could see a golf cart from 250 miles up. Malin Space Science Systems has been analyzing the stream of images it radios home. Malin and Edgett's eyewitness reports are part of a continuing revolution in scientists' view of Mars. In spite of some spectacular failures–spacecraft that crashed, blew up, or went astray–a string of NASA probes have reached the planet in the past five years: Mars Global Surveyor and a lander, both in 1997, and the Mars Odyssey orbiter, which arrived last year to chart surface chemistry. Together they are revealing an unexpectedly complex and baffling planet. "The Mars we see is not the simple Mars we'd heard about," Malin says.