Countdown Nears: Final Tests

'Marsshine' on Shadowed Part of Phobos

These dark streaks, also known as “slope streaks,” resulted from dust avalanches in an area of Mars called Acheron Fossae. The HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured them ...

This image is an artist's concept of a view looking down on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The spacecraft is pictured using its Shallow Subsurface Radar instrument (SHARAD) to "look" under the...

On Mars the seasonal polar caps are composed of dry ice (carbon dioxide). In the springtime as the sun shines on the ice, it turns from solid to gas and causes erosion of the surface

This image shows a cross-section of a portion of the north polar ice cap of Mars, derived from data acquired by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's Shallow Radar (SHARAD), one of six instruments on t...

This image acquired on September 18, 2018 by NASAs Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows araneiform terrain (colloquially: spider-like terrain) located in the south polar region of Mars.

This image shows lava crumpled against the upstream side of an impact crater.

This 3D, or stereo anaglyph, view shows the upcoming science destination for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, a region dubbed "Glenelg," where three different types of material seen from orbit come tog...

This graphic maps locations of the sites where NASA's Curiosity Mars rover collected its first 19 rock or soil samples for laboratory analysis inside the vehicle. It also presents images of the dri...

This close-up image of a dust storm on Mars was acquired by the Mars Color Imager instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 7, 2007.

This picture of a heart-shaped pit was taken on 26 February 2008 by the CTX camera aboard MRO. It is approximately 2 km long. The pit is one of many adjacent to Hydaspis Chaos, a jumbled topographi...

This near-global map was captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using its Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, or CRISM. The yellow square indicates the Nili Fossae region ...

This image, taken with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, shows the transition between the "Murray Formation," in which layers are poorly expressed and difficult to tra...

The bright linear features cutting the bedrock in the center region of this image look like mineral veins.

This graphic depicts the relative shapes and distances from Mars for five active orbiter missions plus the planet's two natural satellites. It illustrates the potential for intersections of the spa...

Northern Hemisphere Gullies on West-Facing Crater Slope, Mars

Interact with this 3D model of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The largest crater in this mosaic of images taken by the Context Camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is Endeavour Crater, which is 22 kilometers (14 miles) in diameter.

Dust-Mantled Topography near Zephyria Tholus

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has seen many places on the planet. One of the most interesting is one of the great canyon systems on Mars.

This cross-section view of underground layers near Mars' south pole is a radargram based on data from the Shallow Subsurface Radar (SHARAD) instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

These long, smooth features are sand ridges shaped by the constant martian wind. They run perpendicular, or at right angles to, the direction of the wind and often found in channels and crater inte...

This map shows five locations where fresh impact cratering has excavated water ice from just beneath the surface of Mars (sites 1 through 5) and the Viking Lander 2 landing site (VL2), in the conte...

This view shows the ground covered in the first image of Mars taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera (HiRISE) on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

This mosaic, taken with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows the planned route (in yellow) of NASA's Curiosity rover from "Pah...