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Terabytes of Mars Pictures Released to Public
Riding with Robots writes "The team that runs the high-rez camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has just released more than 1,200 Mars images to the Planetary Data System, NASA's mission data archive. The team has also released 1.7 Terabytes of data to a user-friendly site that allows users to quickly home in on each image, most of which are a gigabyte-sized files measuring 20,000 by 50,000 pixels. Not all the images have been thoroughly studied yet: in the announcement, the camera's lead scientist said, 'These images must contain hundreds of important discoveries about Mars. We just need time to realize what they are.'"
Here you go: http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/hirise
Saddle up: Riding with Robots
The images are in the (unpopular?) JPEG2000 format; you'll probably need a special viewer to see them. See their FAQ from the google cache (since the site may go down...)
If you're using Windows, the FAQ claims that IrfanView will work -- but I never had any luck with it. Despite having 2GB of memory in my computer, I always got an "out of memory" error when attempting to load the ~500MB images. The plugin from Expressview worked for me.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson