HiRISE: The People’s Camera

The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, orbiting Mars since 2006 on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), has returned more than 99,000 large images with scales as small as 25 cm/pixel.  From its beginning, the HiRISE team has followed “The People’s Camera” concept, with rapid release of useful images and explanations, tools, and facilitating public image suggestions. The camera includes 14 CCDs, each read out into 2 data channels, so compressed images are returned from MRO as 28 long (up to 120,000 line) images that are 1024 pixels wide (or binned 2x2 to 512 pixels, etc.). This raw data is difficult to use. At the HiRISE operations center the raw data are calibrated and processed into a series of B&W and color products, including browse images and JPEG2000-compressed images and tools to make it easy for everyone to explore these enormous images (see http://www.uahirise.org). Automated pipelines keep up with the high data rate; images go directly to the format of the Planetary Data System (PDS-3 and soon also PDS-4). After students visually check each image product for errors, they are fully released just 1 to 2 months after receipt.  More than 1150 Digital Terrain Models derived from HiRISE stereo pairs have been created and released, including some produced outside the team but archived by us in the PDS as a community service. 

We enabled targeting by the broader science community and general public in 2010 via HiWish (http://www.uahirise.org/hiwish/), opening HiRISE targeting to anyone in the world with Internet access, and more than 15,000 of these suggestions have been acquired. Thanks to our community targeting, rapid data release policy, and open distribution of analysis tools, the scientific impact of HiRISE has been extraordinarily high. A search for “HiRISE” and “Mars” in NASA ADS on 5 May 2025 yielded 5,748 items with 2,400 refereed publications (Figure 2). 

Figure 1. Publications with “HiRISE” and “Mars” in their full text from NASA ADS  https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/). 

In addition to direct science, HiRISE has scouted and certified the landing sites for the Phoenix and InSight landers and the Curiosity, Perseverance, and Rosalind Franklin rovers.  Furthermore, HiRISE images have helped to diagnose several failed landing attempts, allowed the Opportunity rover to avoid sand traps, and enabled Curiosity to choose drive paths to minimize wheel damage. 

Public interest in HiRISE has been consistently high for almost twenty years. We’ve released thousands of captioned images (written by science team members and translated into 28 languages). Our images and captions have been featured in many high-quality print magazines and books.  DTMs have resulted in some spectacular flyover movies and perspective views (Figure 2) produced by members of the public and viewed millions of times.

Figure 2.  Mound in Ganges Chasm reprojected to the view from the canyon floor, with no vertical exaggeration (from Sean Doran). 

If all unique coverage, the 99,000 HiRISE images would cover just 4.98% of Mars’ surface, so there is plenty left to see by a future orbiter with HiRISE-class imaging, such as ESA’s Lightship initiative (https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Preparing_for_the_Future/Discovery_and_Preparation/Towards_low-cost_missions_to_Mars).  We hope that future HiRISE-like experiments will follow the open science example of HiRISE.

For more information, see:

McEwen, A.S., Byrne, S. et al., 2024, Icarus 419, id.115795.