A space-loving animator has created stunning flyovers of Mars from data captured by NASA’s HiRISE imager, which is mounted on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite. HiRISE creates detailed digital-elevation models. Crunch that data, add perspective and some cinematic effects, and you have the movies that Doug Ellison, founder of UnmannedSpaceflight.com, posted to YouTube this morning.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured more than 13,000 images of the red planet’s surface. And now, the space agency wants your input on what images to acquire next. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera is currently the most powerful camera on any NASA spacecraft. The images it has collected are truly amazing. They highlight how similar the Martian landscape is to Earth in some ways, as well as how otherworldly other parts of Mars can seem. We’ve collected just a few of the oddest and most beautiful shots. If they inspire you to want to pick the next strange location for HiRISE to focus on, NASA has created a website where you can scan the planet’s surface and make suggestions.

As with most things in life, NASA missions tend to gain the most attention when they either succeed fantastically or fail utterly. When Apollo 11 touched down on the lunar surface in 1969, the New York Times ran with the headline "MEN WALK ON MOON." And when NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory took a nosedive into the Indian Ocean in 2009, newspaper editors and bloggers alike were quick to break out the "FAIL" headlines.

NASA's most powerful Mars orbiter has bounced back from some hard luck around the red planet this year, and scientists are eager to resume the orbiter's detailed observations of Mars in the new year. After a series of glitches that began in February, mission managers put the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) into a protective "safe mode" in August. The spacecraft was resurrected earlier this month and resumed its science operations last week, much to the delight of Mars scientists, who have waited patiently for the orbiter to return to duty. "It's good to have the instruments back on," said MRO mission manager Dan Johnston of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif. "This has been a long stand-down. Now we're ready to resume our science and relay mission."

This impact crater is only about 5.5 meters (18 feet) across - tiny compared to the giant basins that scar most planetary bodies. This type of bowl-shaped crater is called a simple crater. It's "simple" compared to larger craters that have terraces, central peaks and rings, and other, more complex, shapes. Why should we care about such a small, plain crater? One reason is that it's extremely young. The large craters we see on Mars are millions to several billion years old, but this crater formed between January 2006 and May 2008. That means it was only a few months to a few years old when HiRISE observed it. We know this because we have been studying Mars with multiple missions over a long time period, and we can compare images of the same area and detect changes. In this case, the Context camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took an image that had a dark spot in it.

Catherine Weitz, a senior scientist at the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute, has reported new evidence for multiple, water-related geologic processes on Mars. She and her colleagues studied light-toned deposits (LTDs) within troughs of the Noctis Labyrinthus region in western Valles Marineris using data gathered by three Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) instruments: the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, the Context Camera (CTX) and the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM). Weitz presented the research results today during a morning session of the American Geophysical Union Conference in San Francisco, Calif. "We analyzed ten troughs containing well-exposed LTDs, and we found a lot of variability that we didn't expect to see," she said. "We found that each of the troughs with LTDs has a unique mineralogy, and, therefore, the processes occurring in each trough were very localized."

NASA has finally revived its most powerful Mars orbiter from its months-long slumber due to a computer glitch. The spacecraft, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, slipped into a protective "safe mode" in late August, stalling its science observations but safeguarding the $720 million probe from further damage. Instead of rousing the orbiter within a few days, as in past glitches, NASA engineers spent months trying to find the source of the probe's inexplicable computer rebooting malfunctions. "The patient is out of danger, but more steps have to be taken to get it back on its feet," said Jim Erickson, the spacecraft's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured winter images of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander surrounded by dry-ice frost on Mars. As the sun began to reappear on the horizon following the deepest, darkest days of north polar winter on Mars, the HiRISE camera imaged the Phoenix landing site on July 30, 2009, (left image) and in Aug. 22, 2009 (right). The sun was only 1 degree above the horizon when the July image was taken at approximately 2 p.m. local Martian time. In the August image the sun was six degrees above the horizon when the image was taken at about 1:44 p.m., Martian time. By matching up the images with the known location of the Lander, the HiRISE team identified the hardware, disguised by frost, despite the fact that the views were hindered by poor lighting and atmospheric haze, which often obscures the Martian surface at this location and season.

Researchers have caught Martian water ice in the midst of a triply amazing disappearing act. Why triply amazing? The ice was spotted amazingly close to the Red Planet's surface, and amazingly far away from the north pole. The third amazing thing about the observations, made using NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science, is that the researchers knew it was 99 percent pure water ice because of how slowly it disappeared.

It is one of the most dramatic images to ever emerge from Mars. In fact, this extraordinary photograph is so clear that even the sand dunes at the base of the half-mile wide canyon are visible. Experts even believe that they can see the tracks of a Mars lander on the left-hand corner of the Victoria Crater.

This movie shows the southern high-latitudes region of Mars from March 19 through April 14, 2009, a period when regional dust storms occurred along the retreating edge of carbon-dioxide frost in the seasonal south polar cap. Compared with a full-hemisphere view, this view shows more details of where the dust clouds formed and how they moved around the planet. The movie combines hundreds of images from the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, has returned more than 8,214 gigapixel-size images of the Martian surface since the start of the science phase of the mission in November 2006. HiRISE scientists released 1,005 observations of Mars made between April 26 and July 21 to NASA's mission data archive, called the Planetary Data System, and also to the public last week. The new images, a total 3.4 terabytes of data, can be found on the HiRISE Web site. The HiRISE team has so far released a total 26.9 terabytes of data in more than 7,100 observations with 718,000 different image products derived from those observations, said HiRISE operations manager Eric Eliason of The University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. That amounts to more data than has been released by all previous deep space missions combined. The image products include color images and stereo pairs, as well as monochrome images. "If I showed each HiRISE image for 10 seconds, it would take me about 4 years to show them all," said UA's Alfred McEwen, HiRISE principal investigator. Despite this massive data volume, HiRISE images cover less than four-fifths of one percent of the area of the planet.

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander pulled an all-nighter for the first time Monday. Mission controllers extended the spacecraft's schedule to keep it awake during the Martian night so the lander could coordinate with observations made by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) as it flew over Phoenix. Phoenix is using its weather station (which measures temperature, wind speed and wind direction), stereo camera and fork-like thermal and conductivity probe to monitor changes in the lower atmosphere and at the surface of Mars as MRO monitors the atmosphere and ground from above.

A telescopic camera in orbit around Mars caught a view of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suspended from its parachute during the lander's successful arrival at Mars Sunday evening, May 25. The image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter marks the first time ever one spacecraft has photographed another one in the act of landing on Mars.

NASA spacecraft has taken the first-ever image of an avalanche in action near Mars' north pole. The High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took the photograph Feb. 19. The image, released today, shows tan clouds billowing away from the foot of a towering slope, where ice and dust have just cascaded down. The camera was tracking seasonal changes on Mars when it inadvertently caught the avalanche on film. HiRISE mission scientist Ingrid Daubar Spitale of the University of Arizona was the first person to notice the avalanche when sifting through images.