Remember this amazing image from 2008? The HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the Phoenix lander descending on a parachute to land on Mars’ north polar region. MRO will attempt a repeat performance in August of 2012 when the Mars Science Laboratory rover “Curiosity” will be landing in Gale Crater on Mars. Capturing this event would be epic, especially with MSL’s unique “skycrane” landing system. “Yes, MRO is planning to image the descent of MSL with both HiRISE and CTX (Context Camera),” Alfred McEwen, HiRISE principal investigator told Universe Today. “For Phoenix we got a bit lucky with HiRISE in terms of the geometry, giving us a high probability of success. It may not work out so well for MSL. What I’d really like is to capture the rover hanging from the skycrane, but the timing may be difficult.”

The following photos of Planet Mars shatters the idea of an all “red” planet. Mars also has many many hidden, very colorful treasures. The landscape shown is like a post apocalyptic Earth. Or perhaps more what our own planet would look like if we removed almost all life. Nevertheless the Mars landscape is breathtaking and make me daydream of what it would be to build a new civilisation on Mars – starting from scratch. That would be something…

Observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed possible flowing water during the warmest months on Mars. "NASA's Mars Exploration Program keeps bringing us closer to determining whether the Red Planet could harbor life in some form,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said, “and it reaffirms Mars as an important future destination for human exploration." Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring. Repeated observations have tracked the seasonal changes in these recurring features on several steep slopes in the middle latitudes of Mars' southern hemisphere. "The best explanation for these observations so far is the flow of briny water," said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson. McEwen is the principal investigator for the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) and lead author of a report about the recurring flows published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science.

Over the last several decades, evidence has piled up that Mars once played host to liquid water on its surface. But in its current geological era, the red planet is too cold and has too little atmosphere to allow liquid to survive for long. Even at the peak of Martian summer, water would evaporate off quickly during the day, or freeze solid as soon as night hit. But that doesn't mean it couldn't exist beneath the surface, where pressures and temperatures might be quite different, so researchers have been looking for signs that some subterranean liquid might bubble to the surface. Now, scientists are reporting some changes on the Martian surface that seem to be best explained by a watery seep.

Three images of the same location taken at different times on Mars show seasonal activity causing sand avalanches and ripple changes on a Martian dune. Time sequence of the images progresses from top to bottom. Each image covers an area 285 meters (312 yards) by 140 meters (153 yards). The crest of a dune curves across the upper and left portions of the image. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took these images. The site is at 84 degrees north latitude, 233 degrees east longitude, in a vast region of dunes at the edge of Mars' north polar ice cap. The area is covered by carbon-dioxide ice in winter but is ice-free in summer. The top and bottom images show part of one dune about one Mars year apart, at a time of year when all the seasonal ice has disappeared: in late spring of one year (top) and early summer of the following year (bottom). The middle image is from the second year's mid-spring, when the region was still covered by seasonal carbon-dioxide ice.

Thousands of images of Mars are available from the University of Arizona’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), see here. This catalogue contains 16,784 images. When you click on the image, you also get an explanation for the photo. You can also view photos by Themes where the photos are grouped by process such as volcanic action, aeolian (wind), and fluvial (water) forms.

A fresh crater on Mars has revealed a hidden cache of frozen water in some of the latest photos from a powerful NASA spacecraft. A recent false color image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter clearly shows a patch of Mars water ice at the bottom of a 20-foot (6-meter) wide crater in the Martian surface. The photo came from the orbiter's high-resolution HiRISE camera.

There used to be more water than anyone realized on Mars, data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter seems to show. Mars' southern highlands have considerable amounts of phyllosilicates, a type of hydrated minerals formed by extensive water exposure. However, no one knew if there were similar minerals on the northern third of the planet, because it is covered by lava plains up to a mile deep three billion years ago. Researchers have wondered if below that layer of lava there might be hydrated minerals, indicated that eons ago liquid water flowed over the surface there as well.

A team of planetary scientists has used radar and a high-resolution camera to reveal the subsurface geology of Mars' northern ice cap. The findings – based on data from SHARAD (the surface-penatrating radar) and HiRISE (the high-resolution camera) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter – were published May 27 in two papers in the journal Nature. The group studying a canyon feature called Chasma Boreale included Shane Byrne from University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Jack Holt and Isaac Smith of The University of Texas at Austin's Institute for Geophysics are the papers' lead authors. "The ice sheet on Mars' northern polar region is about the size and thickness of the Greenland ice sheet," said Byrne. "Just like Greenland, the layers of ice on Mars preserve a climate record that reaches back probably a few million years. Studying this ice sheet and its internal layers tells us about Martian climate and how it has varied in the past."

This stunning picture is the first image of Earth ever taken from another planet that shows our home as a planetary disc, with the Moon in the distance. Captured by Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as the spacecraft orbited the Red Planet, both the Earth and the Moon appear as crescents, engulfed in the vast darkness of space. Our planet is captured in a 'half-Earth' phase, while the image also shows the Earth-facing hemisphere of the Moon. Because the Earth and the Moon are closer to the Sun than Mars, they exhibit phases, just as the Moon, Venus, and Mercury do when viewed from Earth.

This image shows the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity perched on the edge of Concepción Crater in Meridiani Planum, Mars. This image was taken by HiRISE on February 13, 2010, on sol 2153 of Opportunity’s mission on Mars. If you look closely, you can see rover tracks in the ripples to the north and northwest of the rover! Wow! See below for a wonderful colorized close-up version by Stu Atkinson that shows the tracks very clearly. Scientists use these high-resolution images (about 25 cm/pixel) to help navigate the rover. In addition, rover exploration of areas covered by such high-resolution images provides “ground truth” for the orbital data. Oppy has moved along from Concepcion and is now heading towards a set of twin craters. You can check out Stu's blog Road to Endeavour to see what Opportunity is seeing these days. One milestone (meterstone?) Oppy recently reached was hitting 20 km on her odometer and she seems to continue to be in great operating condition. Go Opportunity!

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) may be the baby of the fleet of spacecraft currently studying the red planet. But the probe has been nothing short of prolific with its Martian observations and recently surpassed more than 100 terabits of data. That number, announced by NASA recently, doesn't mean much to most of us, so SPACE.com has calculated what 100 terabits are in various more everyday measures. Altogether, 100 terabits is 100 trillion bits of information and would take up 17,000 700MB CDs. That would be about 4 million songs, with each lasting about three minute - quite the album collection.

A dramatic picture of an avalanche of Mars has been captured by a powerful camera from orbit. The collapse happened on a towering cliff face in the red planet's far northern arctic region. Scientists believe it happened when the area began to thaw in local spring. Rock, ice and dust were sent plummeting 2,300 ft causing a cloud of fine debris to billow to a distance of 625 ft.

It might look like an oddly circular iceberg in the Antarctic Ocean. But this is actually a crater turned inside-out by time in the Arabia Terra region of Mars. Scientists think such inverted craters form when an impact basin fills with sediment and the material around that sediment gets eroded away. NASA released the false-color, high-resolution picture March 3, 2010, to commemorate a milestone for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: the collection of a hundred trillion bits of data on the red planet. The camera that snapped this shot on January 29, known as HiRISE, is one of six instruments aboard the Mars-orbiting craft.

NASA's newest Mars orbiter, completing its fourth year at the Red Planet next week, has just passed a data-volume milestone unimaginable a generation ago and still difficult to fathom: 100 terabits. That 100 trillion bits of information is more data than in 35 hours of uncompressed high-definition video. It's also more than three times the amount of data from all other deep-space missions combined — not just the ones to Mars, but every mission that has flown past the orbit of Earth's moon. "What is most impressive about all these data is not the sheer quantity, but the quality of what they tell us about our neighbor planet," said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist Rich Zurek, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The data from the orbiter's six instruments have given us a much deeper understanding of the diversity of environments on Mars today and how they have changed over time." The spacecraft entered orbit around Mars on March 10, 2006, following an August 12, 2005, launch from Florida. It completed its primary science phase in 2008 and continues investigations of Mars' surface, subsurface and atmosphere.