First Super Close-Up Pictures of Mars

Alien54 writes "The most powerful camera ever to orbit Mars will get its first close look at the Red Planet on Friday. The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera flying aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) will relay its first low-altitude images to scientists at The University of Arizona beginning September 29. User-friendly web tools will be available to both the science community and the public to view/analyze HiRISE images and to submit observation requests. Processed images will be released soon after acquisition to allow everyone to share in the scientific discovery process. By combining very high resolution and signal-to-noise ratio with a large swath width, it is possible to for images to be collected on scales down to 1 meter."

Ummm...

[Max Threshold]

Aren't the Mars rovers "super close up"?

As opposed to?

[fantomas]

As opposed to ? ... The most power camera to orbit Mars since last Wednesday .. for example?

fantastic headline, "the most powerful camera ever"... :-)

Google

[Kurayamino-X]

How long untill they're on google mars [google.com]?

Re:Ummm...

[grammar fascist]

Yeah, but with the rover pictures all you see is the same old thing: sand and rocks. Now, with these cool new ones, there's a qualitative difference: they show rocks and sand.

In fact, the resolution is *so* high...

[RulerOf]

...That we'll finally be able to determine if the hand that belongs to that face on the Martian surface is giving us the finger.

Re:Not Really the First

[10Ghz]

"On the one hand there will probably be more human traffic on Mars for the forseeable future than on all the other planets of our solar system combined"

People on Earth: 6+ billion
People on Mars: 0

I think you are missing something pretty obvious here :).

Re:Ummm...

[Anonymous Coward]

And blueberries [nasa.gov]. Don't forget the blueberries [spaceflightnow.com] found by the Opportunity rover.

Mmmm.... blueberries [marstoday.com]. Must ... get ... breakfast.

Re:This is news?

[ShakaZ]

Of course they still need to photoshop the thousands of images to remove the green creatures & their buildings... double the resolution, 4x more work, add to that Nasa's funding that's far from what it once was...

Re:Ummm...

[4D6963]

Beagle is the most closest, I guess...

Yup, Beagle 2 must be actually the most deeperest, considered how it must have crashed its way to the martian underground.

Does This Mean...

[CheeseburgerBrown]

...we'll finally be able to identify the Transformer who vandalized the Mars Rover?

I bet it was frickin' Starscream, that bitch.