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.

Vast glaciers of ice are common on Mars, but you have to dig below the surface to find them, new radar views from a NASA spacecraft show. These hidden deposits of buried Martian ice were first confirmed two years ago, but recent scans of the red planet by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are revealing new clues about how the ice may have gotten there. Scientists think the Mars glaciers may have been left as remnants when regional ice sheets retreated. "The hypothesis is the whole area was covered with an ice sheet during a different climate period, and when the climate dried out, these deposits remained only where they had been covered by a layer of debris protecting the ice from the atmosphere," said Jeffrey Plaut of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The ice extends for hundreds of miles, or kilometers, in a mid-latitude region of Mars called Deuteronilus Mensae.

NASA scientists say they've identified thick masses of buried ice in the middle latitudes of Mars and radar mapping suggests the ice is commonplace. The radar images were provided by the space agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is charting the hidden glaciers and ice-filled valleys that were first confirmed by radar two years ago. NASA said the subsurface ice deposits extend for hundreds of miles in a region about halfway from the equator to the Martian north pole.

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.

Less than a year since beginning the prime science phase of its mission, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has passed a mission-success milestone for the amount of data returned. The data-volume target of 26 terabytes, which was surpassed this week, is equivalent to about 5,000 CD-ROMs full and exceeds the total from all other current and past Mars missions combined. The biggest shares of the data come from two of the orbiter's six science instruments: the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment and the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars. The high-resolution camera's team of investigators, based at the University of Arizona, Tucson, today released 143 color images. The images reveal features as small as a desk. They are valuable to researchers studying possible landing sites for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, a mission launching in 2009 to deploy a long-distance rover carrying sophisticated science instruments on Mars.

A super-powerful camera orbiting Mars may help discover the fate of long-lost spacecraft that never phoned home after reaching the red planet. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is now circling that puzzling world, equipped to assist in determining whether life ever arose on the red planet and characterize its climate and geology, as well as prepare for future expeditionary crews to land there. But another sharp-shooting skill of MRO is catching sight of past probes—craft that ran into trouble and died in the line of Mars duty. That includes NASA’s gone but not forgotten Mars Polar Lander and the British-built Beagle 2.

NASA’s newest Mars orbiter has spied the plucky rover Opportunity perched at the rim of the red planet’s massive Victoria Crater as both vehicles explore the fourth planet from the Sun. Appearing almost as a shiny boulder, Opportunity’s lumpy outline and its camera mast shadow can easily be seen in a high-resolution image of Victoria Crater taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and released by the space agency on Friday. “It is so good to see that rover again,” said Steve Squyres, the lead Mars Exploration Rover scientist from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, during a press briefing. “I’ve got to say that image with that little rover 200 million miles away, parked at the top of that cliff, that’s just one of the most evocative images I’ve ever seen in the planetary program…it’s just beautiful.”

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has completed aerobraking and its primary science phase will soon begin in earnest. MRO’s Project Scientist and members of the Navigation Team discuss the intricacies and challenges of aerobraking in Mars’ ever-changing atmosphere. Aerobraking is a technique that was first used by the Magellan mission to Venus in 1993, and also used on two other Mars missions, the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) in 1997 and Mars Odyssey (2001). Aerobraking uses repeated dips into the atmosphere to gradually slow the spacecraft and reduce the size of the orbit. While aerobraking takes time, it saves on the amount fuel required, as in MRO’s case, by 600 kilograms (1,300 pounds). To aid in the aerobraking process, the navigation team employs an atmospheric model called the Mars-GRAM (Global Reference Atmospheric Model), a computer database of information from what previous missions have encountered, combined with a mathematical model that attempts to simulate Mars’ atmospheric dynamics. This provides a prediction of the density of Mars’ atmosphere, giving the navigators an estimate of how far down into the atmosphere the spacecraft should go. But the atmospheric density that MRO actually experienced was much different than what was predicted by the Mars GRAM.

NASA's newest Mars spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, completed its aerobraking phase last week, settling into an orbit that takes it around the red planet in just under two hours instead of the 36-hour circuit it started with. It took five months to maneuver it into this desired orbit using the tricky technique known as aerobraking — dipping into the planet's atmosphere to slow the spacecraft and reshape its orbit — but it saved about $15 million, said Jim Murphy, head of the astronomy department at New Mexico State University. That's about what it would have cost to carry enough fuel to use the spacecraft's rocket engines to maneuver it into the desired orbit, he said.

When NASA launched a pair of rovers to Mars more than three years ago, no one ever thought the darn things would still be working by now, says Cornell astronomer Steve Squyres, the top scientist for the Red Planet rover missions. The proof of that lies in the fix that the Mars program finds itself in today, with two separate missions transmitting on exactly the same frequency. The data traffic jam isn't insurmountable, Squyres says, but it just goes to show that even a smashing success can carry complications.

NASA’s newest mission to the red planet—the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)—is working well as it shaves off altitude in order to swing into active science-gathering duties later this year. The initial capture by Mars’ gravity put the spacecraft into a very elongated, 35-hour orbit.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) began the six-month aerobraking phase with rehearsals or drag passes last Friday and tomorrow night the spacecraft will dip down for its first "taste" of the Red Planet's atmosphere. "We're putting the spacecraft through its paces," said Peter Xaypraseuth, MRO flight engineer in an interview with The Planetary Society earlier today. "We're telling it to do the exact things it would be doing for each upcoming aerobraking pass, except that we're actually not going to be touching or sensing the atmosphere. It's kind of a mock rehearsal." In other words, everything is real, he said, "except the altitude."

The most advanced spacecraft to reach Mars has begun adjusting its orbit so that it can study the planet in detail this fall, scientists said Friday. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter fired its thrusters for nearly a minute Thursday to lower its orbit, a step toward the tricky aerobraking process during which the spacecraft will repeatedly dip into the upper atmosphere starting next week.

A $450 million NASA spacecraft dropped smoothly into orbit around Mars on Friday, successfully completing a risky make-or-break maneuver in its two-year mission to search the red planet for life and find landing spots for future astronauts. Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena erupted in cheers when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which left Earth in August, signaled that it had achieved orbit around a planet that has defeated two-thirds of the probes sent there.

Jittery NASA scientists waited on Wednesday for the most advanced spacecraft ever sent to another planet to make its risky final approach to Mars, where it is due to return 10 times the data of all previous probes put together.

When NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reaches the Red Planet next month, it will immediately seek out areas where water once flowed, try to identify habitats where ancient life might have thrived, and start mapping the entire planet in unprecedented detail. But the orbiter's arrival at Mars will also set the stage for a new epoch in spacecraft telecommunications. Its onboard Electra UHF relay transceiver [see photo, "Relay"] will serve as an engineering test bed for new communications and navigation technology that will be required for all future orbiters, landers, and rovers, to provide the faster data rates required for transfer of information from rovers and landers on the Martian surface to orbiters circling above.

Richard L. James writes "As reported on the Mars-net email list Flight Refuelling Amateur Radio Society's resident satcom + WLAN guru Paul J. Marsh (M0EYT) has managed to detect and receive NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on X band at a staggering range of 45 million miles from Earth using a home made receiver setup and a RFspace SDR-14 software radio."

A NASA spacecraft is halfway toward Mars where it is expected to collect more data on the Red Planet than all previous Martian explorations combined. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter successfully fired its six engines for 20 seconds last week to adjust its flight path in anticipation of a March arrival. It will fine-tune its trajectory two more times before it enters orbit around Mars, said Allen Halsell, deputy navigation chief at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Once in orbit, the two-ton spacecraft will join a trio of probes currently flying around Mars.

A new public exhibit, including a full-scale mock-up of the highest resolution camera ever sent into orbit, is nearing completion in the operations center of the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment mission to Mars. The real 120-pound HiRISE camera, streaking toward Mars since its Aug. 12 launch from Cape Canaveral, is expected to reach the red planet in March, said Lorretta McKibben, public outreach coordinator for HiRISE, housed in the Sonett Space Sciences Building at the University of Arizona.

With today�s launch of NASA�s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars � or CRISM � joins the set of high-tech detectives seeking traces of water on the red planet. Built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., CRISM is the first visible-infrared spectrometer to fly on a NASA Mars mission. Its primary job: look for the residue of minerals that form in the presence of water, the �fingerprints� left by evaporated hot springs, thermal vents, lakes or ponds on Mars when water could have existed on the surface.

NASA�s latest robotic mission to further unlock the mysteries of the red planet, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), successfully blasted off Friday, a day after a software glitch had scrubbed its initial launch. The MRO was carried into space on an Atlas V rocket and is now on a nearly seven-month journey to Mars. "Surveying for the deepest insights into the mysterious evolution of Mars!" NASA commentator George Diller said after liftoff. The launch came just three days after space shuttle Discovery completed its mission.

NASA postponed the launch of a spacecraft to Mars on Thursday after a glitch popped up in the computer software used for monitoring the fueling of the rocket used for liftoff. The problem with sensors and software that measure the amount of fuel being loaded into the rocket appeared with just minutes left until liftoff. The launch was rescheduled for Friday morning, three days after the shuttle Discovery returned to Earth.

A year and a half after twin robot rovers thrilled space fans with their hijinks on Mars, NASA is heading there again. But Tuesday, the agency announced Wednesday's scheduled blast off was postponed one day so that equipment used to guide the vehicle during liftoff can be checked out by the manufacturer. The fourth Mars orbiter is set to launch on an Atlas V rocket Thursday from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It will carry some of the most sophisticated science instruments ever sent into space, including the largest telescopic camera sent to another planet.

WELSH scientists are playing a vital role in Nasa's 17th mission to Mars next month. They are hoping it will be a case of third-time-lucky for one of the instruments onboard - the Mars Climate Sounder. Two previous attempts to put this instrument into orbit around Mars have been besieged by troubles, but a team of infra red instrumentation specialists from Cardiff University, led by Professor Peter Ade and Dr Darren Hayton of the School of Physics and Astronomy, believe that this time the instrument, designed and assembled by Nasa JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) in Pasadena, California, will get there.

NASA's next mission to Mars will examine the red planet in unprecedented detail from low orbit and provide more data about the intriguing planet than all previous missions combined. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and its launch vehicle are nearing final stages of preparation at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla., for a launch opportunity that begins Aug. 10, 2005. The spacecraft will examine Martian features ranging from the top of the atmosphere to underground layering. Researchers will use it to study the history and distribution of Martian water. It will also support future Mars missions by characterizing landing sites and providing a high-data-rate communications relay.

Engineer Kevin McNeill compares the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to his two children, who recently left home for college. "You're hopeful everything you've done in 18 years of raising that child has prepared him for life on his own," McNeill said Wednesday, hours before he and his colleagues boxed the school-bus-size craft for shipping. On Friday, McNeill and the rest of his Lockheed Martin team will send their $500 million baby to Florida. NASA is expected to launch the craft Aug. 10, 2005.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Lockheed Martin mark another significant milestone in the Mars space exploration program as .Lockheed Martin delivered the vehicle that will launch the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission to Mars. The Atlas V, designated AV-007, arrived at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., where the launch team will now begin preparations for the August 10, 2005 liftoff.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is one giant spacecraft, built to take unprecedented photos of the red planet. Engineers are in test time mode here at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, builder of the spacecraft, as the countdown ticks down for the probe�s summer launch. Teams of technicians now swarm around the spacecraft as it enters the final four months of system and environmental tests. The checklist calls for the Mars-bound craft to be "out the door" of the aerospace company in April and en route to Florida. Brimming with science instruments -- rooted to a potent chassis of electronic, propulsion, and mechanical gear -- MRO will be the largest spacecraft to orbit the red planet. Science gleaned from this mission is expected to dramatically expand our knowledge of Mars.

Even as the Spirit and Opportunity rovers complete a year of successful operation on Mars, the next major step in Mars Exploration is taking shape with preparation of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for launch in just seven months. The orbiter is undergoing environmental tests in facilities at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, Colo., where its Atlas V launch vehicle is also being prepared. Developments are on schedule for a launch window that begins on Aug. 10, 2005.

Boulder and Denver aerospace companies joined forces this month when the most powerful Mars camera ever built was installed on NASA's $500 million Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. The orbiter is under construction at Lockheed Martin Space System's Waterton Canyon facility southwest of Denver. The camera was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies in Boulder.

The camera that will take thousands of the sharpest, most detailed pictures of Mars ever produced from an orbiting spacecraft was delivered today for installation on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) will be launched on Aug. 10, 2005, carrying a payload of six science instruments and a communications relay package to boost the ongoing exploration of the red planet.

Five spacecraft are circling Mars and creeping across its ruddy surface, looking for traces of long-gone waters and signs that the cold, arid planet may once have been hospitable to life. The robotic martian invasion - three orbiters and two six-wheeled rovers - has already uncovered strong evidence that water once flowed on Mars and is now locked in subsurface ice. But big questions about water on Mars remain. When did it flow? How long did it last? How much was there? Where did it come from? Where did it go? Perhaps the most tantalizing question: Were there long-lived watery environments where microbial life could have gained a foothold?

The next spacecraft destined for Mars is rapidly coming together here on Earth -- an interplanetary probe that carries the most powerful instruments ever sent to the red planet. NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO for short, is being readied for sendoff next year. The huge spacecraft carries a suite of instruments, including a camera system able to provide ultra-close-up images of Mars' surface, and a sounder to probe for water that might linger subsurface on the planet.

Two free public programs in Pasadena this week will introduce NASA's next Mars mission, a multipurpose orbiter under assembly for launch next August. NASA is equipping the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to advance our understanding of Mars through detailed observation, to examine potential landing sites for future surface missions, and to provide a high-data-rate communications relay for those missions.

With one very busy year remaining before launch, the team preparing NASA's next mission to Mars has begun integrating and testing the spacecraft's versatile payload. Possible launch dates from Cape Canaveral, Florida, for NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter begin Aug. 10, 2005. The spacecraft will reach Mars seven months later to study the surface, subsurface and atmosphere with the most powerful instrument suite ever flown to the red planet. "Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is a quantum leap in our spacecraft and instrument capabilities at Mars," said James Graf, the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Weighing 2,180 kilograms [4,806 pounds] at launch, the spacecraft will be the largest ever to orbit Mars.

When it enters its final path around the red planet, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will be closer to the martian surface than any other orbiter has ever gone. This closeness will enable the orbiter to get more detailed images than ever before from above the planet's surface, and its sophisticated suite of science instruments will reveal much more about Mars and its water history. It will also become the first link in a communications bridge back to Earth, an "interplanetary internet" that can be used by numerous international spacecraft in coming years.

Winning the largest single grant in UA history for a 2007 mission to Mars against stiff competition sounds easy when compared with safely landing the $300 million spacecraft on the surface of the Red Planet. A soft touchdown for the spacecraft dubbed the Phoenix mission was the main topic at the first formal meeting of mission scientists held this week, said William Boynton, UA cosmochemist and co-principal investigator for the mission.

Save a lot of room in your Mars picture book. NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is a you-haven't-seen-anything-yet spacecraft. Set for liftoff in August 2005, the MRO will scrutinize the red planet like no previous orbiter and become the cornerstone of a futuristic interplanetary Internet. Tipping the scales at over two tons, this interplanetary probe is geared to relay back images and science measurements using the widest dish antenna and highest power level ever operated at Mars. As the "inspector general" in the Mars brigade from Earth, MRO is expected to yield unmatched close-up observations of Martian features. Its suite of high-resolution instruments will also assist in pinpointing sites of high science payoff for future landers, plus help ascertain touchdown hazards for robotic vehicles as well as future human expeditionary crews.

As Earth pulls away from Mars after last month's close approach, NASA is developing a spacecraft that will take advantage of the next close encounter in 2005. That spacecraft will make a more comprehensive inspection of our planetary neighbor than any previous mission.

As Earth pulls away from Mars after last month's close approach, NASA is developing a spacecraft that will take advantage of the next close encounter in 2005. That spacecraft, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, will make a more comprehensive inspection of our planetary neighbor than any previous mission.

The University of Arizona and Planetary Laboratory's Phoenix design has won the bid for NASA 2007 Scout Mission to Mars, netting them a staggering 325 million dollar funding grant. The Phoenix Mission, which will carry equipment designed by UA researchers Peter Smith and William Boynton, will put a lander on the icy northern plains of Mars. The lander's robotic arm will excavate a trench and retrieve samples for geological and chemical analysis.

France's space agency announced on Wednesday it would pull out of major missions to explore Mars and to peer into the phenomena of deep space after it notched up a cash shortfall of 90 million euros (99 million dollars) last year. As part of the cuts, the CNES would scrap French participation in Netlander, in which a US-European consortium plans to send four landers to Mars in 2007 to map its terrain and weather system.

Earthquakes great and small happen virtually every day on our planet. Even our moon experiences quakes. But do any of our planetary neighbors, like Mars, get shaken? Scientists don't know, but they will soon find out. Since the 1960s, researchers have sent numerous spacecraft to explore Mars. These probes, such as the Mariner series, brought back images of craters and relics of ancient volcanoes on the Red Planet's surface. But no one was sure what was happening inside Mars. Underground, it might well be seething with activity. Now, Thomas Pike of the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London is designing an instrument to check for "marsquakes."

NASA's Kennedy Space Center has chosen International Launch Services (ILS) to launch the latest in its series of missions to Mars. ILS is scheduled to launch the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on an Atlas III launch vehicle in August 2005 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. The Atlas is one of three families of rockets offered by ILS, which is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. and two Russian companies, Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center and RSC Energia of Moscow. ILS was formed to market and manage the missions for the Atlas and the Russian Proton and Angara vehicles. Both the Atlas rocket and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are being built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. of Denver. The Atlas II and III series boast a perfect record of 100 percent mission success in 60 consecutive launches.

Researchers at Imperial College London have just begun a 5-year project to design and build tiny earthquake measuring devices to go to Mars on the 2007 NetLander mission. Unlike the instruments on next year's European Mars Express/Beagle II mission, the Marsquake sensors will be the first to look deep inside the planet. The internal structure of Mars is a key to understanding some fundamental questions about the planet including whether life ever existed there. The sensors are capable of detecting liquid water reservoirs hidden below the surface, where life could possibly survive on Mars today. The recent discovery by the Mars Odyssey orbiter of large amounts of ice at the poles opens up the possibility of liquid water existing in the warmer conditions underground near the Martian equator. Dr. Tom Pike is designing the heart of the sensor, a two-centimeter square of silicon. "We're micromachining a near-perfect spring and weight from a single piece of silicon. We'll be able to detect the weight shuddering in response to a Marsquake from anywhere on the planet," he said.

British scientists started building tiny 'Marsquake' sensors on Thursday that will be able to detect underground water supplies and could help in the search for life on the red planet. The 2007 NetLander mission will land four sets of instruments near the Martian equator to examine the planet's weather and geological structure. The quake sensors will be the first to look deep inside the planet, the team responsible for their construction said. "We will look at how the vibrations from Marsquakes travel through the planet and work out what is going on deep inside," said Imperial College London researcher Dr. Tom Pike. "If these vibrations hit liquid water under the landing sites, we should see a distinctive signature," he added. "That is when the search for life on Mars will move underground."

The Canadian Space Agency is angling for a chance to fly to Mars with a groundbreaking U.S. mission in 2007, and is using work on an innovative planetary landing system to try to impress NASA scientists. Canada's contribution could also include robotic mining equipment designed to delve below the Martian surface for the first time and dig up a wealth of information on the mysterious red planet. If the agency's role gets a green light from NASA and budget chiefs in Ottawa, it will probably cost Canada in the hundreds of millions of dollars, an agency official said yesterday. "Mars is one of those subjects that really catches people's interest and it could be a tremendous education and outreach opportunity ... especially for young people," said Alain Berinstain, the organization's Mars lead.

NASA today announced the selection of 10 scientific investigations as part of the 2005 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. The 2005 mission will carry six primary instruments that will greatly enhance the search for evidence of water, take images of objects about the size of a beach ball, and search for future landing sites on the martian surface. The investigations selected include two principal investigator instrument investigations and eight facility team leader or member investigations.

With the selection of Lockheed Martin to build the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), NASA is one step nearer to getting a closer look at the Red Planet, but according to the project's program manager, Kevin McNeill, the spacecraft's builders face a wide variety of technical challenges. Lockheed Martin was given the green light Wednesday to construct the MRO, to be launched in August 2005. The craft is to return the highest resolution images of the Martian surface ever taken by Mars-circling orbiters. Objects as small as the size of beach balls will be resolved through the lens of the orbiter's camera system, said Jim Graf, the MRO project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. JPL will manage the mission that will operate for five-and-a-half years.

NASA has selected Lockheed Martin Astronautics to design and build the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter at its south Jefferson County facility. The highly complex orbiter, which will measure Martian landscape features as small as 8 to 12 inches across, is twice the mass and will return 12 times the amount of data as the Mars Global Surveyor, now in orbit. The Global Surveyor, which also was built by Lockheed, has returned more than 101,000 images in its four years of mapping the Martian surface in 1-meter detail. Lockheed's $145 million contract for the 2005 orbiter will cover development through operations. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is Lockheed's partner in the mission.

NASA selected today the builder of a Mars orbiter equipped to snap super-close-up pictures of the red planet�s enigmatic surface. Lockheed Martin has been green-lighted to construct the spacecraft, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), to be launched in August 2005. The craft is to return the highest resolution images of the Martian surface ever taken by Mars-circling orbiter. Objects as small as the size of beach balls will be resolved through the lens of the orbiter�s camera system, said Jim Graf, the MRO project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. JPL will manage the mission that will operate for five-and-a-half years.

Cairo has given the go-ahead for French-based scientists to use the Egyptian desert to test sophisticated water-seeking probes before blasting them into space in the race to find water on Mars. "After laboratory work, we now want to study the performance of our prototypes on terrain which matches the surface of Mars as closely as possible," said Egyptian astronomer Essam Heggy, involved in the project. The Netlander system, composed of four land-penetrating radars, will be put to the test in the Western Desert near Siwa in February 2002, ahead of plans to send it to Mars in 2007 on board an Ariane-5 rocket.

Putting a zoom lens on the Red Planet is the camera-toting task for NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Slated for Earth departure in August 2005, the Mars-circling MRO will snap super-detailed portraits of the Martian landscape. MRO's powerful imaging system can help identify safe and scientifically rewarding landing sites for future robotic craft, as well as human expeditions. Reconnaissance imagery from the orbiter will be a factor of five over what the current Mars Global Surveyor camera cranks out, says the mission's Project Scientist Richard Zurek.

Participants at the 3rd Canadian Space Exploration Workshop (CSEW) had the happy task on Saturday of putting together a wish list of scientific objectives for a Canadian program of Mars exploration. On Friday night, Canadian Space Agency Executive Vice President Marc Garneau had surprised the space sciences community by announcing his intention to see Canada become a major player in the international Mars research scene. Calling on researchers to be bold and to 'think big,' Garneau made his announcements on the 40th anniversary of US President John F. Kennedy's famous 'put a man on the moon' speech. The announcement also came with the promise of funding that will be "an order of magnitude greater" than what exists currently, putting the budget in the hundreds of millions range.

Participants at the 3rd Canadian Space Exploration Workshop (CSEW), being held in Montreal this weekend, were among the first to hear that Canada wants to go to Mars. In a pre-banquet speech on Saturday night, former astronaut Dr. Marc Garneau, now serving as Executive Vice-President for the Canadian Space Agency announced that the CSA would be expanding its space exploration efforts over the next several years, with Mars research being a major focus. The announcement came on the 40th anniversary of President Kennedy's stirring and oft-quoted call for an American presence on the moon.

What could be a story out of an old science fiction magazine is instead a combination of three highly advanced modern sciences � biotechnology, genetics and space exploration � in an attempt to set the stage for a colony of humans on Mars. At the University of Florida, a team of scientists has genetically modified a tiny plant to send reports back from Mars by emitting a fluorescent glow. If all goes as planned, 10 varieties of the plant could be on their way to the red planet as part of a $300 million mission scheduled by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for 2007.

In what reads like a story from a 1950s science fiction magazine, a team of University of Florida scientists has genetically modified a tiny plant to send reports back from Mars in a most unworldly way: by emitting an eerie, fluorescent glow. If all goes as planned, 10 varieties of the plant could be on their way to the Red Planet as part of a $300 million mission scheduled for 2007. The plant experiment, which is funded by $290,000 from NASA's Human Exploration and Development in Space program, may be a first step toward making Mars habitable for humans, said Rob Ferl, assistant director of the Biotechnology Program at UF.

James Graf of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has been named manager of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. As project manager, Graf will oversee all aspects of the development and operations of the mission, proposed for launch in August 2005. The mission will conduct remote sensing of the planet's surface to identify evidence of past or present water and will help identify safe and scientifically exciting landing sites for future robotic and perhaps someday human missions. The Reconnaissance Orbiter will also establish a telecommunications link for future missions.