The Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) is now well into its third martian year of daily global weather monitoring and high resolution imaging from its nearly-circular, nearly-polar "mapping" orbit. The spacecraft began orbiting Mars in September 1997, and began its mapping activities in March 1999. The mission is currently planned to operate through September 2004.

Twice a year, after an intensive data validation effort designed to insure that the most complete and accurate version of each image is identified and processed, six month's worth of MOC data are archived with NASA's Planetary Data System (PDS). This month, the MOC team has completed archiving the 11,664 images obtained between February and July 2002 (mission subphases E13 - E18). These new data can be viewed by visiting the MOC Gallery at:

http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/

The MOC experiment is in excellent health and continues to return a wealth of new information every day. Below we present six examples of MOC daily global and high resolution geology images, some of which were acquired in the first three months of 2003.

MOC2-325 Daily Global Views

MOC2-326 Kasei Landslide

MOC2-327 Polar Features

MOC2-328 Martian Limb

MOC2-329 Northern Spring

MOC2-330 Wirtz Dunes

Images Credit: NASA/JPL/MSSS
Text by: K. S. Edgett and M. C. Malin, MSSS

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Malin Space Science Systems, Inc.

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