The most powerful camera sent to another planet has snapped pictures of Mars so detailed even faint tracks left by the rover Opportunity on the planet’s surface are visible.
“Oh, the pictures are better even than I expected,” said Harold Reitsema, a deputy director at Boulder-based Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp., where the camera was built.
“They look like someplace you could get out and walk around in,” Reitsema said.
NASA’s water-seeking Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter slipped into orbit about 200 miles above the planet’s surface earlier this month.
Engineers at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Jefferson County built the craft, which carries Ball’s desk-sized camera. At $720 million, the MRO is NASA’s most expensive Mars mission.
“The goal always is to try to find life elsewhere in the universe, and water and life are synonymous,” said Wayne Sidney, MRO flight engineering team lead with Lockheed.
In a news conference Monday, MRO officials showed pictures of layered ice and dust, gully systems, fractured rocks and rippled dunes.
“We’re seeing features on Mars we’ve never seen before,” said Alfred McEwen, an MRO scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Lockheed engineers have long been involved in Mars science, starting with building the Viking landers that touched down in 1976.
They built two orbiters currently at the planet – the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey – and two failed craft – Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander, both launched in 1998.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has now passed behind the sun, NASA officials said. When it re-emerges Nov. 1, scientists will begin collecting data in earnest.
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-954-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
