14 DAY TRIAL // NASA has a great photographer on Mars, the Curiosity rover has been snapping away for the past year or so since it landed. But she can only cover so much ground. Orbiters like the MRO and its HiRISE camera are much better at seeing a larger portion of the surface, but this means a loss in detail.
Still, that creates another problem, HiRISE creates 120 megapixel images and it has covered huge portions of the surface of Mars. That's a lot of data that needs to be stored and, more crucially, understood.
NASA has several teams dedicated to handling big data, whether it's in the form of huge amounts of observations from radio telescopes, or transforming HiRISE images into stunning 3D movies, like the “Soaring Over Mars” animation from which the image above was captured.