THE FIRST HiRISE IMAGES ARE IN! And they are gorgeous! These images are sharp, clear and beautiful in the "quick-look" or raw form. "Incredible," says Candy Hansen, Deputy Principal Investigator. The first image is 2.5 meters per pixel. The fourth image will be about 1.5 meters per pixel. We will get to less than a meter per pixel after the primary science orbit is achieved in September, when the orbiter is closer to Mars.

"I am VERY happy!" says Alfred McEwen, Principal Investigator and chief scientist of the HiRISE camera. "They are sharp, clear, and beautiful!"

The first image is 20,000 by 10,000 pixels, a small image, and the detail is incredible.

Your web blogger is furiously working to put some photos up! I'll have images of folks here up soon. And the Mars images should be released to the public tomorrow.

Bradford Castalia, Sofware Development Lead at HiROC, reports that all of the image processing pipelines are working great. These automatically obtain and process the HiRISE images. By 5 a.m. we will have more images.