78,000 Mars Global Surveyor Photos Online

angkor writes: "AP is reporting that the Mars Global Surveyor snapped its 100,000th picture of Mars. The Viking orbiters took about 55,000 total. Even better is that over 78,000 of the images are online in the (MOC Gallery). You get to click on a map of Mars to zoom into a specific region. Wow."

Comments

How will we use this information?

[wnknisely]

In stellar astronomy, people have used pictures of the sky for a long time to quickly and easily search for interesting objects like binary stars, galaxies or variables. Many modern celestial maps are just digitized sky images.

I suppose that a set of full scale photo map of Mars taken at different times will allow us to look for any climate or seasonal surface changes - which would be useful in a search for Matian life forms. Given a broad enough time scale, you might also be able to look for evidence of erosion features - but I doubt we'll be able to see such processes on Mars in my lifetime.

If nothing else, it'd be interesting to look closely at the boundary between the northern and southern hemispheric regions.