Where Do the Images Shown on the Planet Four Projects Come From?

The images you review on the Planet Four projects (Planet Four, Planet Four: Terrains, and Planet Four: Ridges) come from two different cameras onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). MRO has been in orbit around Mars since March 2006. Science operations commenced in November 2006. Nearly 14 years later and MRO has continued to observe and monitor the Red Planet.

MRO is equipped with several instruments :

• HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) – a high-resolution color imager
• CTX (Context Camera) – grayscale mid-resolution imager
• MARCI (Mars Color Imager) – color weather imager used to monitor clouds and Martian dust storms
• CRISM (Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars) – spectrometer that can take composition images of the surface – 2-dimensional maps of the different compositions of the surface
• MCS (Mars Climate Sounder) – probing the conditions within the Martian atmosphere: temperature, dust, and water vapor concentrations
• SHARAD (Shallow Radar) – ground-penetrating radar to explore the structure of the Martian subsurface

As MRO orbits Mars, it performs a complex ballet where the different images are taking observations at different times throughout the orbit. The observations are requested by the instrument science teams who are doing a wide variety of science with MRO.

On Planet Four, we use the high resolution color images from HiRISE which can see from orbit surface features down to about the size of your average. HiRISE has a resolution of about 30 cm/pixel. HiRISE is the highest resolution imager sent to another planet in Solar System. In Planet Four: Terrains and Planet Four: Ridges we’re using the grayscale CTX images which covers a wide area but at a lower resolution (6-8 m/pixel) compared to HiRISE. CTX actually provides context for where HiRISE and CRISM are observing and every time these two instrument takes an observaiton, CTX snaps an image as well. HIRISE is so high-resolution that CTX provides the context to tell researchers about what the topography and area around the HiRISE image. If you’ve ever checked out Google Mars visible imagery, you’ve seen some of CTX’s handywork. CTX has image nearly all of the Martian surface several times over.

MRO has now completed over 60,000 orbits around Mars and sent back a whopping 388 terabits of data to Earth. It’s still going strong and HiRISE and CTX are continuing to function. As long as they do, we hope to be able to put those images onto the project sites to continue exploring the current and past climate of Mars.To mark 15 year since the launch of MRO, NASA has put together a great collection of images taken by the spacecraft and its imagers and this video below to mark a decade of MRO science shows some of the striking images the cameras onboard have taken of the Red Planet.