NASA’s Mars Orbiter Hits a Major Milestone, Captures 100,000th Image

Nearly two decades ago, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) launched from Earth and began its long and winding journey to the Red Planet. Since landing in orbit over Mars in 2006, this spacecraft has quietly turned the way astronomers understand another planet on its head. On October 7, 2025, one of the instruments on board, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, or HiRISE for short, captured its 100,000th photo.

HiRISE is particularly noteworthy for its capacity to detect features as small as 3 feet wide from hundreds of miles above ground. Ball Aerospace constructed the camera, which is maintained by the University of Arizona, and it employs a giant telescope to transmit back super sharp photos of craters, dunes, ice deposits, and potential landing locations. Over the years, those images have demonstrated that Mars is a place of constant change, with active processes such as wind and snow captured in action, massive dune fields shifting around, and avalanches rushing down steep slopes.

The 100,000th photograph was taken of a location called Syrtis Major, some 50 miles southeast of Jezero Crater, where the Perseverance rover is now exploring. Basically, you have these gigantic mesas towering straight up from the plains, while dunes carve out patterns across the landscape. Scientists are attentively analyzing this view to try to figure out how sand accumulates and produces dunes over time. Here’s the cool thing: a high school student submitted this target through the HiWish initiative, which allows anybody, anywhere, to select a location for HiRISE to photograph.

HiRISE’s mission is not limited to discovery. It also has a very practical side, providing precise maps that help identify safe landing locations and find subsurface water ice, which will be useful for any future operations. The orbiter returned almost 450 terabytes of data, which is more than enough to fill a full library with high-resolution images. Teams can even develop 3D models and virtual flyovers from these pictures, allowing anyone to explore Martian terrain from their own computer screen.