More interesting data from our web statistics: rankings of the most popular images on our website. Some you’d expect to get lots of hits: special campaigns like Phoenix lander hardware and Phobos, and of course old favorites like a certain feature in Cydonia. Others have made a splash in the news, like the avalanche caught in action and a deep pit that might be the entrance to a cave – whether their popularity on our website is a cause or effect of the media coverage.

I find it interesting to see which “regular” images, out of the thousands we’ve taken, caught people’s attention – in May, for example, gullies in a crater wall and ridges in Huo Hsing Vallis (left) were popular. June saw lots of hits on this beautiful image of the north polar layered deposits (above) and this image of delicate-looking, multi-tendriled slope streaks.

In July, the “Mystery Mounds” (PSP_008778_1685 and PSP_008548_2205) were popular, presumably because they are so “mysterious” – ? (By the way, these two areas, despite their similar titles, are nowhere near each other on Mars.) Lesson learned: We should give more of our images “sexy” titles.

Wow, what a day! I still can’t believe how beautiful the images are that we’ve seen today. The detail is absolutely astounding. I’m quite exhausted from all of the work that we’ve been doing to prepare for these images, but somehow I still have left-over energy from the excitement of the day. I am so happy with the images, and it’s extremely gratifying to see everyone’s hard work pay off. Congratulations HiRISE team!
I can’t wait until tomorrow when I get to see the next images that we are acquiring.

The second image has been released in its full-scale version.

I’ve had my fill of chocolate cake (delicious) and of crowds (they seemed to come in waves, and they all seemed to center around the various 30-inch monitors scattered about the Operations Center), but I have not had my fill of new images of Mars. We are seeing such amazing detail. Some people may laugh that we are excited about seeing rocks, but this new ability to see boulders from orbit is a breakthrough in Mars remote sensing. With HiRISE, we begin to bridge the gap between the imaging abilities of orbiters and those of rovers.

The full images have been filtering in over the last few minutes, here’s the operations team looking at the entire first image for the first time!

The second image has already started to come down. We are all still on our high from the first image. To imagine that we will have thousands of these images in the next few years, it’s incredible!

Things are starting to calm down here a bit. We’re enjoying some food, going back to the engineering data to make sure everythings running perfect, and all in all, we’re just starting to soak in the events of the day. But we won’t have long, in the next week we will take about 70 of these pictures, before we are turned of for the upcoming Solar conjunction. Who knows what mysteries of Mars will be unveiled during this exciting time!