The first view released by controllers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory was taken by the spacecraft�s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, or HiRISE. The camera took the image from an altitude of 2,489 kilometers (1,547 miles).

MRO also pointed its two other cameras at Mars beginning at 11:36 p.m. Eastern Time Thursday, while the spacecraft collected 40 minutes of engineering test data. Those cameras are called the Context Camera and the Mars Color Imager.

"These high-resolution images of Mars are thrilling, and unique given the early morning time-of-day. The final orbit of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will be over Mars in the mid-afternoon, like Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey," said MRO mission principal investigator Alfred McEwen, of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

"These images provide the first opportunity to test camera settings and the spacecraft's ability to point the camera with Mars filling the instruments� field of view," said Steve Saunders, the mission's program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. "The information learned will be used to prepare for the primary mission next fall."

Saunders said the main purpose of these images is to enable the camera team to develop calibration and image-processing procedures such as the precise corrections needed for color imaging and for high-resolution surface measurements from stereo pairs of images.

To get desired groundspeeds and lighting conditions for the test images, researchers programmed the cameras to shoot while the spacecraft was flying at the 2,489-kilometer (1,547 mile) altitude - or about nine times higher than the range planned for the orbiter's primary science mission. Nevertheless, HiRISE produced a resolution of about 2.5 meters (8 feet) per pixel - an object 8 feet in diameter would appear as a dot - comparable to some of the best resolution previously achieved from Mars orbit.

Further processing of the images during the next week or two is expected to combine narrow swaths into broader views and show color in some portions.

MRO has been flying in elongated orbits around Mars since it entered orbit on March 10. Every 35 hours, it has swung about 44,000 kilometers (27,000 miles) away from the planet then come back within about 425 kilometers (264 miles) of the Martian surface.

Mission operations teams at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif, and at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, continue preparing for aerobraking. That process will use about 550 careful dips into the atmosphere during the next seven months to shrink the orbit to a near-circular shape less than 300 kilometers (200 miles) above the ground.

For its first test images, the orbiter transmitted more than 25 gigabits of data, enough to nearly fill five CD-ROMs. The data were received through NASA's Deep Space Network station at Canberra, Australia, and sent to JPL. They were made available to the camera teams at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, Calif.

Mission scientists said additional processing has begun for release of other images from the test in a few days.

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