NASA celebrates 15 years of Mars orbiter with stunning photos

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) recently passed its 15th anniversary leaving Earth behind to observe the red planet, and NASA is celebrating by recapping some of the robot’s best images. You’ve probably seen some of them pop up over the last few years but maybe never stopped to appreciate how much this mission has contributed to our understanding of Mars. Well, here’s an opportunity to soak it all in.  The MRO launched in 2005 aboard an Atlas V rocket, reaching Mars several months later. NASA designed the probe to last for about five years, but here we are significantly past that, and the MRO is still going strong. Most of the images we’ve seen from the MRO comes from the orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, which is a 0.5-meter (1 ft 8 in) reflecting telescope. That’s the largest ever carried into deep space, and it shows. The images the MRO has returned of Mars are startlingly clear, thanks in part to the planet’s thin atmosphere.  Read more...More about Nasa, Mars, Science, and Space