I make no bones about the fact that I love the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. With its 50 centimeter (18 inch) resolution, it's returned one astonishing picture after another. I've picked several for my annual Top Ten Astronomy Pictures, too. And now NASA has announced something incredibly cool: they are allowing the public to choose locations for HiRISE to image! It's easy enough. Just go to their website, register, and then you can look at other suggested spots or suggest one yourself. I suggested one myself: re-imaging a black pit on Mars that I featured in my Top Ten pictures of 2007:
This is a rimless pit, basically a cavern on Mars. I suggested they image it again at a different time of day, yielding three-dimensional information about it. The change in the Sun angle will allow scientists to see how steeply it's sloped, where the ...
