[LINK] "Scientists wowed by data from Mars probe"

[rfmcdonald]

MSNBC is one of many, many sources to carry the news that NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is proving to be astonishingly adept at the collection and transmission of very large quantities of data indeed.

The space agency said Wednesday that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has sent back 100 terabits of information since 2006. That's equal to 100 trillion bits of data — the equivalent of about 3 million songs in MP3 format, or 35 hours of uncompressed high-definition video.

To put it another way, that's more than three times the total amount of data sent back by all the previous missions that have flown past the orbit of Earth's moon.

[. . .]

"What is most impressive about all these data is not the sheer quantity, but the quality of what they tell us about our neighbor planet," the orbiter's project scientist, Rich Zurek of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a mission update. "The data from the orbiter's six instruments have given us a much deeper understanding of the diversity of environments on Mars today and how they have changed over time."

Among the mission's major achievements is the finding that water has had an effect on or near the surface of Mars for hundreds of millions of years. This activity was at least regional and possibly global in extent, though possibly intermittent.

The spacecraft has also observed signatures of a variety of watery environments, some acidic, some alkaline. Such observations increase the likelihood that future probes could find evidence of past life on Mars, if it ever existed.

This isn't nearly the volume of data I'd personally like, mind--I'd like more data, and preferably from more sources; it's a pity, I think, that the Voyager probes weren't joined in their Planetary Grand Tour of the four gas giants in sequence by others--but it's a good start.