Camera on NASA Mars probe snaps its 100,000th photo of the Red Planet

NASA’s sharp-eyed Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) just notched a big milestone.

MRO’s HiRISE (“High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment”) camera has now snapped 100,000 photos of the surface of Mars, NASA announced on Tuesday (Dec. 16).

Image number 100,000, which was captured on Oct. 7, “shows mesas and dunes within Syrtis Major, a region about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southeast of Jezero Crater, which NASA’s Perseverance rover is exploring,” NASA officials said in a statement on Tuesday.

“Scientists are analyzing the image to better understand the source of windblown sand that gets trapped in the region’s landscape, eventually forming dunes,” they added.

MRO arrived in orbit around Mars in March 2006, tasked with searching for signs of past water activity on the Red Planet and conducting a variety of other investigations.

HiRISE — which is capable of resolving features as small as a coffee table on the Martian surface — has been key to that wide-ranging mission.

“HiRISE is the instrument the mission relies on for high-resolution images of features ranging from impact craters, sand dunes, and ice deposits to potential landing sites,” NASA officials said in the statement. “Those images, in turn, help improve our understanding of Mars and prepare for NASA’s future human missions there.”

Though MRO has been operating at Mars for more than 20 years, it’s not the longest-lived NASA Red Planet orbiter. That distinction goes to Mars Odyssey, which has been studying the planet from above since October 2001.

MRO and Odyssey are two of nine spacecraft actively studying Mars up close. The others are NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers and five other orbiters: NASA’s MAVEN, Europe’s Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, China’s Tianwen 1 and the United Arab Emirates’ Hope mission.

MAVEN may be in trouble, however: It has been silent since Dec. 4 and has apparently begun spinning in an unexpected way.